The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [171]
21
The Path to Freedom*
{* Written with Ann Druyan.}
We must not believe the many, who say that only free people ought to be educated, but we should rather believe the philosophers who say that only the educated are free.
Epictetus, Roman philosopher
and former slave, Discourses
Frederick Bailey was a slave. As a boy in Maryland in the 1820s, he had no mother or father to look after him. (‘It is a common custom,’ he later wrote, ‘to part children from their mothers... before the child has reached its twelfth month.’) He was one of countless millions of slave children whose realistic prospects for a hopeful life were nil.
What Bailey witnessed and experienced in his growing up marked him forever: ‘I have often been awakened at the dawn of the day by the most heart-rending shrieks of an own aunt of mine, whom [the overseer] used to tie up to a joist, and whip upon her naked back till she was literally covered with blood... From the rising till the going down of the sun he was cursing, raving, cutting, and slashing among the slaves of the field... He seemed to take pleasure in manifesting his fiendish barbarity.’
The slaves had drummed into them, from plantation and pulpit alike, from courthouse and statehouse, the notion that they were hereditary inferiors, that God intended them for their misery. The Holy Bible, as countless passages confirmed, condoned slavery. In these ways the ‘peculiar institution’ maintained itself despite its monstrous nature - something even its practitioners must have glimpsed.
There was a most revealing rule: slaves were to remain illiterate. In the antebellum South, whites who taught a slave to read were severely punished. ‘[To] make a contented slave,’ Bailey later wrote, ‘it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason.’ This is why the slaveholders must control what slaves hear and see and think. This is why reading and critical thinking are dangerous, indeed subversive, in an unjust society.
So now picture Frederick Bailey in 1828 - a 10-year-old African-American child, enslaved, with no legal rights of any kind, long since torn from his mother’s arms, sold away from the tattered remnants of his extended family as if he were a calf or a pony, conveyed to an unknown household in the strange city of Baltimore, and condemned to a life of drudgery with no prospect of reprieve.
Bailey was sent to work for Capt Hugh Auld and his wife, Sophia, moving from plantation to urban bustle, from field work to housework. In this new environment, he came every day upon letters, books and people who could read. He discovered what he called ‘this mystery’ of reading: there was a connection between the letters on the page and the movement of the reader’s lips, a nearly one-to-one correlation between the black squiggles and the sounds uttered. Surreptitiously, he studied from young Tommy Auld’s Webster’s Spelling Book. He memorized the letters of the alphabet. He tried to understand the sounds they stood for. Eventually, he asked Sophia Auld to help him learn. Impressed with the intelligence and dedication of the boy, and perhaps ignorant of the prohibitions, she complied.
By the time Frederick was spelling words of three and four letters, Captain Auld discovered what was going on. Furious, he ordered Sophia to stop. In Frederick’s presence he explained:
A nigger should know nothing but to obey his master - to do as he is told to do. Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world. Now, if you teach that nigger how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave.
Auld chastised Sophia in this way as if Frederick Bailey were not there in the room with them, or as if he were a