You Can't Read This

by Val Ross

  Despite these blind spots, Louis Braille’s system has opened up millions of books – novels, school texts, histories, mysteries, even nursery rhymes, in more than fifty languages – to people who can’t see. The boy from Coupvray, whose life seemed blighted by that one childhood accident, succeeded in putting the world of reading at their fingertips.

  Freddy the Slave Boy

  IN THE DAYS before the Internet, radio, and TV, reading gave people access to the larger world. So the best way to keep them ignorant was to forbid them to read. But that was easier said than done.

  reddy was eight years old when he was introduced to Tommy. Tommy was then aged two. Both boys lived in the American state of Maryland, in 1826. But Tommy was white and Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey was brown. Freddy was a slave, and little Tommy was his new master.

  Freddy had come from the plantation of a white man named Captain Aaron Anthony (some people whispered that the captain was Fred’s real father). The slave boy hardly knew his mother, Harriet. When he was tiny she had been sent to work in the fields. Freddy had been brought up by his granny.

  A slave’s life was brutal. Before he was eight, Freddy had seen the captain whipping people, including the boy’s own cousin Hester. All the slaves feared the master’s anger, but not as much as they feared being sold, which meant being taken away, probably forever, from all their family and friends. Being sold was what had happened to Freddy’s sister, his aunts, and seven cousins.

  Now some relatives of Captain Anthony, Hugh Auld and his wife, Sophia, had asked if they could use Freddy to look after their little boy, Tommy. Frederick, just a piece of property, had arrived at the Aulds’ home in the city of Baltimore, frightened and alone.

  At first the Aulds were good to the eight-year-old. Instead of an old corn bag, which was what slaves used for blankets out on the plantation, they gave Freddy a straw bed and a blanket; instead of ash cakes (rough cornmush baked in the embers of the fire) he had bread and porridge. His new masters even gave him shoes and trousers, so he could go out in public and run errands across town.

  His new mistress seemed kind. She read aloud to Freddy and Tommy from the Bible. Her voice, Frederick later remembered, was “mellow, loud and sweet.” He was entranced. He asked his mistress to teach him to read. Of course, she said.

  They began with the alphabet. He absorbed that quickly, so they went on to simple words of three and four letters. Soon the slave boy could pick these words out of the Bible. Wonderful! said the mistress. Then she made a big mistake. She boasted to her husband that young Freddy could almost read.

  Hugh Auld’s rage was terrible. Behind it there was fear – fear that the whole rotten system of slavery could come tumbling down if the dark-skinned workers ever got hold of the power that goes with reading. Years later, Frederick wrote that the white man had screamed at his wife, “Learning will spoil the best nigger in the world!” and added, “He should know nothing but the will of his master and learn to obey it!” Frederick also wrote that his master’s ranting “stirred up not only my feelings into a sort of rebellion, but awakened within me a slumbering train of vital thought.” Hugh Auld’s determination to keep his slave ignorant gave Frederick the determination to educate himself.

  The Aulds weren’t the only obstacle in Freddy’s way. Some states had laws forbidding slaves to learn to read. Owners knew that if slaves read all those posters advertising for the return of runaways, they’d realize that escape was possible. Worse, they might read about human rights, or about the abolitionist movement, which aimed to end slavery altogether. Or they might learn that in 1803-1804 the slaves of Haiti had risen up, driven out their masters, and established a free black republic.

  Virginia, Georgia, and North and South Carolina passed laws in 1829 and 1831, threatening fines, whipping, and imprisonment for anyone teaching slaves to read. Any black people who were found to be able to read would have a finger cut off, so they wouldn’t be able to write. In 1831, a Virginia slave named Nat Turner led a rebellion that left more than sixty white people dead. Nat Turner could read. For some frightened slave-owners, that confirmed it: They would have to crush any signs of reading.

  Scalded by her husband’s fear and anger, Mrs. Auld tried to harden her heart against Freddy and his dreams. “Nothing appeared to make my poor mistress more angry than seeing me, seated in some nook or corner, quietly reading a book or newspaper,” Frederick recalled years later. “I have had her rush at me with the utmost fury, and snatch from my hand such newspaper or book, with something of the wrath or consternation, which a traitor might be supposed to feel on being discovered in a plot by some dangerous spy.” The Aulds would send little Tommy hunting for Freddy, to make sure he wasn’t sneaking in time with a book.

  So Frederick had to find other ways of learning. There were white boys on the streets of Baltimore who would give him a short lesson if he brought them a biscuit from the Aulds’ house. There was an old black man in the neighborhood, a Christian named Charles Lawson, who liked to read the Bible with Frederick and let the boy try to read it to him. And there were tough kids down by the shipyards who were unwitting accomplices. With a piece of chalk, Freddy would scrawl the letters he already knew on the pavement and then dare the white kids to “beat that if they could,” They’d write more letters, Frederick would copy the new letters, and the game would go on.

  When Master Tommy was old enough to go to a real school – for white children only, of course – he brought home his copybooks and left them lying around. Frederick quietly stole them away to a hiding place in the attic. If anyone found him, he knew, he would be whipped. But the risk was worth it. Crouched in the attic late at night, he rewrote the lines Tommy had written in school, making his letters look as much like Tommy’s as possible.

  Because Frederick was good-looking and bright, people in the Aulds’ neighborhood would get him to run small errands. Sometimes they’d pay him with a shiny coin. By age thirteen, the slave had earned enough money to go out and buy a book. For fifty cents he bought himself a copy of The Columbian Orator.

  Sometimes a lucky reader finds a book that reassures him that he is not alone, and not crazy. This was one of those books.

  Inside were speeches by famous men such as the Roman orator Cicero, and Daniel O’Connell arguing for Catholic Ireland’s freedom from England. If these essays excited Frederick, he was even more startled to find that his book contained a dialogue between a master and his slave; the slave convinces the master that it is wrong to “own” another human being.

  The Columbian Orator was like a match; it lit a fire in Frederick’s mind. The boy took to reading newspapers he found blowing in the gutters of Baltimore. He learned about the abolitionists. He learned that there were states to the north, and the British colony of Canada, where slaves could be free.

  When Frederick was fifteen, his owners suddenly informed him that he would be leaving Baltimore to work on a farm owned by Hugh’s brother Thomas. The country Aulds were even meaner than the city Aulds. There was less food, more beatings. Frederick hated this new life. He refused to call Thomas Auld “master.” His owner sent him to a “slave-breaker” to be beaten into submission. This man, a Mr. Covey, whipped Frederick so often that the slave’s shoulders were scarred for life.

  One day, Frederick hit Covey back.

  Covey stopped cold. He realized that if he killed the young man, he would have to pay Thomas Auld for lost property. If he went to the police, and people heard that a slave had hit the slave-breaker, he would lose his slave-breaking business. So Covey backed off. He said nothing. He quietly delivered Frederick back to his owner.

  In 1836, the eighteen-year-old Frederick and some friends tried to run away, but they were captured. Two years later, Frederick tried again. Borrowing some official documents from a free man, a black sailor he’d met in Baltimore Harbor, he boarded a train for the north. Whenever a white person questioned him on that long train ride, he showed the sailor’s papers. When he got off t
he train he was in the free city of Philadelphia, in the free state of Pennsylvania. Before the year was out, he had married a free black woman named Anna and had changed his identity. Gone was Bailey, a name that was probably on runaway-slave posters all over Baltimore. He chose a new name, that of a hero in Sir Walter Scott’s The Lady of the Lake: Douglass.

  This new free man, Frederick Douglass, found a job as a manual laborer and started teaching other ex-slaves to read. Because he used language so beautifully, people asked him to make public speeches against slavery. In the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, those sorts of speeches could get you heckled and beaten. Frederick Douglass ignored the insults and even the occasional beatings. He became a public-speaking star.

  Over six feet tall, he cut a memorable figure, reported a Swedish writer. He had “an unusually handsome exterior … those beautiful eyes were full of dark fire.” He was “forcible, keen and very sarcastic,” said a Massachusetts newspaper. “He talks as well, for all we could see, as men who have spent all their lives over books.”

  Before long, he tried writing books himself. His first, M31 Bondage and My Freedom, was published in 1855. It told of his early life, of the beatings on the plantation, the Aulds, the slave-breaker Covey, My Bondage became a bestseller in America and Europe, and went through nine editions in England alone, Frederick Douglass toured Scotland, Ireland, and England, speaking to halls packed with thousands of people, (By this time, slavery had been illegal throughout the British Empire – including Canada – for over twenty years.)

  As well as being a writer, a newspaper publisher, and a brilliant public speaker, Frederick Douglass was part of the Underground Railroad, the secret network that helped slaves escape to freedom. He did all he could to end slavery.

  In 1847 the Douglass family had moved to Rochester, New York, another free state. Here, with financial backing from white abolitionists, Frederick launched a newspaper, The North Star. This newspaper carried essays, columns, and editorials by Douglass, excerpts from novels by Charles Dickens, and in 1848 an announcement of a meeting at Seneca Falls, New York, to discuss voting rights for women, Douglass went to Seneca Falls, one of a handful of men in a sea of women’s faces. He stood and made a speech in favor of giving women the right to vote. Of all his causes, he later wrote, the fight for women’s rights gave him the most pride: “When I ran away from slavery it was for myself; when I advocated emancipation, it was for my people; but when I stood up for the rights of woman, self was out of the question.” He added proudly, “I found a little nobility in the act.”

  Slavery did not end easily in the United States. Although the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 declared slavery illegal, many people remained enslaved until the end of a bloody civil war, in 1865. Even after that, most black people remained trapped in poverty. Many were still abused, and almost all were shut out of the best jobs and opportunities.

  In the last years of his life Frederick Douglass was often disillusioned and angry. But he was also often triumphant. The former slave who had struggled so long and so ingeniously to “learn his letters” became the American ambassador to the black republic of Haiti, and a faithful champion of black and women’s rights. If you ever visit the city of Rochester, New York, you can see an image of this man who taught himself to read by daring other boys to write letters on the sidewalk, and by chasing scraps of newspaper down the streets. There’s a bronze statue of Frederick Douglass taking tea with the feminist Susan B. Anthony. The two appear to be deep in discussion about how to make this a better world.

  The Two-Faced Treaty

  TRANSLATION LETS US read what was written in another language. But it leaves us at the mercy of the translator. As the Armenians discovered long ago, an alphabet that spells the sounds of one language may not work for another. In the same way, a language that expresses the thoughts of one culture may lack words that are vital to another. In that case, how can the translation ever be accurate?

  he tall brown man, his face marked with blue tattoos, strode purposefully up the grassy slopes of Flagstaff Hill That was the name New Zealand’s pakeha (white British settlers) had given it. The Maori warrior knew the place by other names. Looking down, he could see Kororareka, a little port town on the North Island of New Zealand. Its streets were famous for rum shops, taverns, gun-toting adventurers, brawls, and women of bad reputation. Missionaries called Kororareka the hellhole of the Pacific. New Zealand’s first surveyor-general had reported that it was “a vile hole, full of impudent, half-drunken people.”

  The view of the town no doubt disgusted the tall warrior, whose name was Hone Heke. His people, who had lived in New Zealand according to their code of honor for centuries, had a purer and more beautiful image of their country, Aotearoa, the Land of the Long White Cloud.

  Hone Heke, flanked by his wife, Harriet, and the warrior Kawiti, portrayed by Joseph Jenner Merrett. As an artist, Merrett helped document Maori culture; in his other job, as a land surveyor, he helped undermine it.

  Hone Heke turned his eyes away from the town, fixed his gaze for a moment on the flagpole on the hill’s summit, and then swung his axe. His first blow caused the flagpole, and the Union Jack that flapped atop it, to shudder. The man reared back and swung his blade again and again. Down crashed the flagpole and the flag of Her Majesty Queen Victoria, ruler of the British Empire.

  This was not the first time that Hone Heke had chopped down the Union Jack at Kororareka. As far as the British settlers were concerned, if Hone Heke provoked them again, there would be war. As far as Hone Heke was concerned, it was time for payback – payback for the land grabs by pakeha settlers, payback for the imprisonment of Maori warriors, for the loss of local trade because the white government had raised taxes – and most of all, payback for the broken promises of the Treaty of Waitangi, which had promised one thing in its Maori text, and something different in the English version.

  All over the world, as European settlers and traders moved in on other cultures, they brought pieces of paper that they urged local people to sign. These papers – treaties, proclamations, contracts of purchase – gave the newcomers land. Often, the local people couldn’t read the papers. Too late, they learned that what was written there supposedly allowed the Europeans to fence off farms, build towns, cut down trees, hunt and fish and generally take over. As for the promises the Europeans signed to repay the local people, they didn’t seem to be worth the paper they were printed on.

  This was the experience of aboriginal people in Canada, the United States, Africa, South America, and all around the Pacific. It’s a story that is still unfolding in many places in our own time. It is still unfolding in New Zealand, the island nation founded by the Treaty of Waitangi, one of the world’s best-documented examples of a treaty that changed in translation.

  Hone Heke had been at the original signing of the treaty on February 6, 1840, at Waitangi, near Kororareka. The signing had been celebrated by 1,500 Maori men performing the haka – the traditional war dance, like a series of karate moves, which ends with the warriors making ferocious faces, bulging their eyes and sticking out their tongues fearsomely. He knew that the Treaty of Waitangi had been signed in two languages, English and Maori, by chiefs and by British officials resplendent in their plumed hats.

  Only 39 chiefs knew enough English to read and sign the English version. Most signed the Maori version. (The translation had been done by English missionaries,) At Waitangi and eventually across New Zealand, about 450 Maori chiefs had signed or put their marks on the agreement. Whenever Maori expressed doubt about the wisdom of signing, the missionaries reassured them that the treaty would protect them from greedy settlers and drunken whalers coming ashore and stealing their fish and their women. Reassured by his missionary friends, one Maori leader, Nopera, explained to his people, “Ko te atakau o te whenua …” – “The shadow of the land goes to the Queen [of England], but the substance remains with us.”

  Maori chiefs signing the Treaty of Waitangi on February 6, 1840. Thoug
h many others signed the document at later dates, the anniversary of this first signing is celebrated as Waitangi Day, New Zealand’s national birthday.

  But this was not what the treaty said in English. The missionaries had overlooked the fact that some ideas simply couldn’t be translated. While the English treaty gave Queen Victoria all “rights and powers of sovereignty” over New Zealand, the Maori treaty gave her “te kawanatanga katoa,” the right to govern their lands. The difference? When you vote a government into office, you’re telling them to do a good job – not to take over the ownership of your house.

  Hone Heke, who had been taught to read and write by missionaries, actually supported the treaty that day in 1840. No wonder he (and many others) felt betrayed by what happened next. The treaty said Maori could only sell their lands to the government, usually at a low price. Yet the settlers could sell land to one another – so Maori had to sell their land cheaply and then watch as the value kept going up and up. Sometimes settlers started surveying Maori land even before the government was finished playing middleman. At the South Island community of Wairau, in 1843, an armed clash left four Maori and twenty-two settlers dead.

  As the violence rose, emotions got uglier. Some of the settlers were rude and contemptuous toward New Zealand’s original people. One, Joseph Somes, summed up the settlers’ arrogance when he wrote, “We have always had very serious doubts about whether the Treaty of Waitangi, made with naked savages … could be treated by lawyers as anything but a praiseworthy device for amusing and pacifying savages for the moment.”

  In July 1844, Hone Heke staged his first public attack on the symbol of British rule; he chopped down the flag on the hill overlooking Kororareka. The British put it back up and, by the way, informed everyone that Kororareka was now to be called Russell. Hone Heke attacked the flagpole again. Back up it went. After the embittered chief axed it a third time, the British tried to sheath the pole in metal to protect it.