Going Against the Grain

My grandma always said to me “you better get your lesson child!”  After reading “Literacy as a Mandate for Action” and “Literacy Opportunities after 1800” in Royster’s “Going Against the Grain”, I have a whole new appreciation for that saying.  It was prohibited to teach slaves how to read and write in efforts to keep them completely disconnected form the rest of the world.  When they were first granted their emancipation, “African Americans understood the implications of literacy and learning in political, economic, and social progress. Royster 123” The root of this idea seems to dwindle among our culture in that we no longer pay close attention to the crucial topics at hand thus displaying our lack of literacy in these areas.

When our ancestors were transported to the Americas from the homeland we embodied our own native language.  It’s not that we were illiterate we just didn’t know the popular literacy that was necessary at the time in order to advance.  There were those who believed that slaves should be educated.  Slaveholders believed that it would improve the efficiency of the slaves, while social reformers of the oppressed, and Christians believed in their education as well.  Those who did advocate for the education of African Americans also had a strong belief in that the education should be limited so to not give the slaves any type of power over them.

Literacy has its costs.  While we may yearn for the opportunity to become literate it truly depends on the content and context of that literacy.  Whites allowed the slaves some literacy in order to take them out of their so-called “barbaric ways” and convert them into Christians who know and understand the law and the language.  Whites did all they could to strip slaves of their own identities and literacies and forced them to become part of the newfound society completely extinguishing their native literacies.  These circumstances make you rethink the cost of literacy and whiter it’s worth the trouble.

Literacy is about expressing yourself in your own way, not about conforming or doing what is expected of you.  Go against the grain.  By the 19^th century there was a large group of literate African Americans where the ability to read was more developed than the ability to write.  How ironic that our oppressors are able to once again have control.  We have the ability to read their literature, but don’t have the necessary writing tools in order to give a response and our own opinion.

           Catherine Williams Ferguson a former slave formed her own religious educational school to help orphaned children.  It wasn’t until African Americans began to form their own schools did we have control over our literacies.  It’s important that we appreciate all that our ancestors have endured so that we may have the benefit of those literacies allowing us to express our true opinions.

Wood grows in a way that makes it easy to cut in one direction, the grain.  Going against the grain is when you go the difficult route and cut in the other direction.  It is going against the norm and in our case, developing literacy despite those who attempted to keep us uneducated and ignorant.