Up from Slavery

The entrance examination was a broom. A boy who had walked and begged rides five hundred miles to reach Hampton was told to sweep a recitation room; he swept it three times, dusted it four, and was admitted on the evidence of the corners. Booker T. Washington was born on a dirt floor in Virginia, property before he was a person, and he tells his life as a ledger of small hard-won things: the surname he invented on the spot the first morning a teacher asked for his full one, arithmetic stolen off the figures painted on salt barrels, three brick kilns that collapsed at Tuskegee before he pawned his watch to fire a fourth. The calm of the prose is the most extraordinary thing in it, and the most disquieting. His famous counsel of patience, separate as the fingers yet one as the hand, was a bargain struck with a country busy writing segregation into law, and the whole book is the sound of a man deciding what it costs to be heard.