Name’s Booker: Booker T. Washington if you want the whole of it. A lot of you folks won’t have heard of me. You probably heard of those great speakers, the orators and leaders like Martin Luther King or Malcom X. Well, one of them was an underdog, the other a rebel, and I can’t claim to be either. But that’s not why people don’t know me. I wasn’t around at the same time as those two boys. Was already dead in 1915, before any of that started or came to an end. I was born in Hale’s Ford, Virginia, to a mother who was a slave. Don’t know my birth date, just the date I died. I loved my momma; she was a sweet lady and full of affection, but that don’t change the fact I was born the son of a slave. She worked on the cotton fields while I stayed with the other slave kids on the plantation. Still, I got to learn to read and write like the others –by the others, I mean the white kids. That was a while after, though. My momma used to always tell me stories at bedtime. She taught me to pray. I never knew my father, and my mother worked for her master till the Big Day came.
When it was coming time for the Big Day to arrive, you could hear more singing in the slave quarters than usual. The slave men and slave women were on the lookout all night long. It was the end of the civil war between the Union and the Confederacy. They sang for liberty, and an end to their suffering and servitude. One sunny morning, a Union officer dressed all in blue with his red cap came to the plantation to make a speech to all us slaves. He told us the Confederacy had lost the war, and Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated. This was the Big Day, the day we heard the Emancipation Proclamation. Then the freed slaves all began to sing in unison:
I'm on my way to Canada,
That cold and dreary land,
The sad effects of slavery
I can no longer stand,
My soul is vexed within me more
To think that I'm a slave,
I'm now resolved to strike the blow
For freedom, or the grave.
Oh, righteous Father, will thou not pity me,
And aid me on to Canada, where all the slaves are free.
My momma and I were finally free. Emancipated. We could go wherever we wanted, anywhere and forever. My mother leaned over and kissed me, tears of joy shining on her cheeks. She explained to me what it meant, that this was the day we’d been praying for all along, the day of our total liberation. She was happy, then. She’d been afraid she wouldn’t live to see the Big Day, that her prayers would never be answered. After the emancipation, my mother went to join my father, who I’d never known until that day, in West Virginia. It was a free state, a Union state. I got to go to school. I learned to speak, to read and to write. I hung out with children my own age, all black kids like me. At school, my classmates all called me Booker. The more we learned to talk, the more we could write, and the more we could read! That was how we stayed friends. I had to get an after-school job in a coal mine so I could pay to go study at the Hampton Institute. In the mines my face was always caked in dust, and it was hard to breathe. But to me, education was everything. Without schooling I could never have taken the noble path and defend the cause of my people; the African-Americans as we’re called now.
I was named head of the Tuskegee Institute at the age of 25. I was a powerful speaker. Just because my mother and I had been emancipated did not mean the fight was over. There was still racism and hatred of Negroes to be vanquished. If I saw that today there was a bar on the side of a highway using my name, calling itself Booker Tea Washington...well, I wouldn’t call that much of a victory. In the South they still have separate water fountains for people of colour, one school for whites and another for blacks, restaurants for blacks and restaurants for whites. It’s a scandal, is what it is. We have to keep fighting every day against all these acts of hatred, these unhinged attitudes, these cruel behaviours that the white man can still subject upon his equal, his friend, his brother.
Alan Alfredo Geday