In Celebration of Books, Winter 2019

Remarks

As a way to begin, I'd like to invite you to participate in a brief, early morning time-travel exercise.  

Imagine for a second that you are living on Maryland's Eastern Shore almost 200 years ago in the 1830's and 40's. There is no Bay Bridge, no electricity, no internet or phones, and no Gunston School. For the hunters amongst you, there would be ducks and geese aplenty. On a day like today, you'd be worried about firewood. There would be lots of horses, but no car traffic, boat engines, or airplane noise. Andrew Jackson is President. When the weather warms up, you know you'll be able to swim in a clean and clear Chesapeake Bay.

But living here in the early to mid 1800's, you live in a slave society, and since the Eastern Shore landscape is dominated by large agricultural plantations reliant on slave labor, most likely your life—no matter where you stood in society-—revolves around slavery and agriculture.  For your entire life, this slave society has existed, and most likely, it is the only type of society you can imagine.

But among you during this time lives—less than 15 miles from here—an incredible and brilliant young man, born a slave on a farm in Talbot County near Tuckahoe: Frederick Douglass.  If he lived now, in 2018, Frederick Douglass would likely be the valedictorian at Easton High School, or perhaps a star student here at Gunston. In addition to his powerful intellect, Douglass was tall and athletic, and by all accounts he had a beautiful voice—he would likely have been a valued member of Gunston's Chorale, and during a late winter afternoon like today, he might be heading out to play futsal with Señor Angarita, or tossing the lax ball with his bros. Mr. Wiening would probably be on his case to cut his long, curly hair, and to take off his hat. I'm sure he would be worried and stressed about his homework.

But when Frederick Douglass grew up on the Eastern Shore in the 1800's, it was illegal to teach him, or any slave, how to read. If a slave was caught reading, they would be subject to physical punishment, or worse. As fate would have it, Frederick Douglass left the farm in Talbot County as a young teenager—just about your age—and moved to Baltimore to live as a slave with the Auld family.  There, his life transformed. Here is what he wrote:

Very soon after I went to live with Mr. and Mrs. Auld, she very kindly commenced to teach me the A, B, C. After I had learned this, she assisted me in learning to spell words of three or four letters. Just at this point of my progress, Mr. Auld found out what was going on, and at once forbade Mrs. Auld to instruct me further, telling her, among other things, that it was unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave to read." Mr. Auld said, if Frederick learned to read, "There would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave."

Douglass wrote further,

"These words sank deep into my heart...From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom."

On Gunston's In Celebration of Books Day—where we take books for granted—I trust it's hard to imagine what it would be like to be forbidden to read books, so it's probably also easy to overlook Douglass's insight, which is one of the most profound that you will ever come across: the idea that the condition of your own freedom—and in Frederick's case, also the liberation from physical bondage—always begins by escaping a state of ignorance through education and books.  

Indeed, he eventually authored one of the most transformative books ever written in English: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. For those of you who have not read this book, it needs to be on your list. If you lived on the Eastern Shore in the early 1800's, imagining the kind of free, integrated, multiracial society we have today would likely be close to impossible, but as soon as his autobiography began to circulate in the 1840's—and it was read by tens of thousands—not only did it lead to his own intellectual and physical freedom—he liberated scores of people from their states of ignorance and prejudice. Of course, if Gunston had existed in 1840's, and we had an event called In Celebration of Books, giving you his autobiography to read would have been illegal.

Let me share with you one final insight from Douglass, and I as read this passage, I invite you to imagine what it would feel like, at your age, to be first learning how to read, in secret, knowing that what you are doing is illegal. He wrote:

I set out with high hope, and a fixed purpose, at whatever cost of trouble, to learn how to read. As I writhed under it, I would at times feel that learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing. It had given me a view of my wretched condition, without the remedy. It opened my eyes to the horrible pit, but to no ladder upon which to get out. In moments of agony, I envied my fellow-slaves for their stupidity. I have often wished myself a beast. I preferred the condition of the meanest reptile to my own. Any thing, no matter what, to get rid of thinking! It was this everlasting thinking of my condition that tormented me. There was no getting rid of it. It was pressed upon me by every object within sight or hearing, animate or inanimate. The silver trump of freedom had roused my soul to eternal wakefulness. Freedom now appeared, to disappear no more forever. It was heard in every sound, and seen in every thing. It was ever present to torment me with a sense of my wretched condition. I saw nothing without seeing it, I heard nothing without hearing it, and felt nothing without feeling it. It looked from every star, it smiled in every calm, breathed in every wind, and moved in every storm.

While it's a little hard for me to clearly imagine what Frederick Douglass might have been like as a Gunston student, I have no trouble imagining what he might say about our In Celebration of Books program. He would say: Reading is Freedom. Learn all you can. Be open to change. Embrace the pain of combating your own ignorance. And never, ever take the gift of books and reading for granted.