"Up from Slavery" by Booker T. Washington

Café 42's Book Selection

My dear beloved regulars,

I don’t remember where I read about Booker T. Washington’s “Up from Slavery” book but as I love human stories, especially when they are entwined within human History, I thought I had much to learn with such a book so I put it in my Amazon cart and ordered it rightaway waiting for the right time to read it which happened to be on the beach during my summer vacations.

What stroke me the most in that narrative is that man’s resilience ability. Indeed, the book relates Booker’s life which began as a slave when he was a boy until his early teenagehood and his striving to first get an education and then devote his life to allow other Southern black people to get one. His purpose was to prove white Southerners that his own people were capable of learning, doing worthy work and hence create wealth to make the Southern economy great again. He is never resentful to slaverers because, as he states it marvelously, Black and White were just part of an economic system that nobody questionned. This was how things were and worked, no judgement.

Something I had never thought of, and probably not many people before me either, is what happened in black people’s heads after the first hours that followed the announcement of the Emancipation Proclamation? After they rejoiced tremendously about being free. What then? For freedom always come with a price, right ? Nowadays, when you work as an independant, the freedom it grants you goes with the pressure of making your own money each week/month. When you were a slave all your life, you lived in awful conditions but you never had to worry about shelter nor your own food, as meager as it was, which was given to you by your master. Imagine then, you’re a middle aged adult, you can’t read or write, you have no eductation whatsoever, you don’t know any trade other than cropping cotton in the fields and, one day, you have to take care of yourself from A to Z in a world in which you were never allowed to go before. How would you feel about that? That must have been so terrifying!