27 pages • 54 minutes read
Frances Ellen Watkins HarperLearning to Read
Fiction | Poem | YA | Published in 1872A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Historical Context: The Reconstruction Era
“Learning to Read” and the rest of the Aunt Chloe poems originally appeared in Watkins Harper’s collection Sketches of Southern Life (1872), a poetic response to the Reconstruction period.
Lasting from 1865 through 1877, the Reconstruction period marked the period after the Civil War. The US government attempted to compensate African Americans for slavery while readmitting the eleven treasonous Confederate states into the United States.
These goals came into odds since the South’s desire to legally preserve slavery and white supremacy led to their secession from the US. As a result, white supremacists undid these programs when they regained a foothold in southern state governments and passed laws restricting voting rights. White southerners increasingly terrorized and attacked Black citizens in retribution for going “agin’ their rule” (Line 4). Watkins Harper alludes to hate crimes, and white resentment: “how the Rebs did hate it” and the “Rebs did sneer and frown” (Lines 3 and 28)
However, there were successes during the Reconstruction period too. The federal government successfully added the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution. These amendments, respectively, illegalized slavery and indentured servitude, granted citizenship and equal protection under the law to anyone born or naturalized as an American, and enabled men to vote regardless of their race, color, and previous status as an enslaved person.
Freed African American citizens relentlessly pursued founding schools during this time. They did not want to waste any time since only 10-15% of southern Black people possessed literacy skills. Everyone in the community took time to attend lessons, even older adults like the 60-year-old Chloe. Many saw it as a way to heal and combat the racism they faced trying to establish themselves as free and active American citizens. Watkins Harper portrays literacy’s benefits for Black people when Chloe says that once she learned to read, then she was able to buy a cabin “to call my own” (Lines 41-42).
Due to the low literacy rates among Black southerners, schools sometimes sourced teachers from the North. In the poem, Chloe references Yankee teachers that “came down” (Line 1). Northern activists, churches, and federal government agencies sent Black and white teachers to help establish schools for southern Black communities.
Watkins Harper expresses Black people’s tentatively hopeful and earnest spirit despite discrimination and the trauma they faced during the Reconstruction era in “Learning to Read.” The reader sees it through Chloe’s recollection of the previous generation’s defiance of unjust laws and the celebration of her material gains.
Literary, Sociological, and Cultural Context: Oral Tradition and Folktales
The oral traditions of enslaved peoples saved many lives, stories, and cultural traditions, and they provided hope for Black people suffering under American slavery. Long before the advent of writing, humans transmitted ideas and pooled information through a diverse range of oral traditions, including many that were an elaborate form of spoken or sung storytelling. These traditions allowed people to transmit historical memory, belief systems, survival techniques, values, and collective identities.
One of the oral tradition’s strengths lie in its accessibility. Employing one’s voice, hands, or body parts to communicate does not require the manufacture or use of external resources. Many materials—such as paper and electronics—naturally deteriorate over time. People can also censor, erase, or physically destroy physical and electronic documents. If the sole record of something only exists in text, the information may be lost forever if destroyed. As a result, many cultures find it easier to preserve and disseminate information across regions and generations through speech.
Because pro-slavery states prohibited teaching Black people, so enslaved people adapted folktales from their home countries to address the conditions of slavery and provide hope. The storytellers secretly recorded their experiences and family histories through this oral tradition, which then carried on through subsequent generations or across communities when enslavers sold enslaved people to other plantations.
Enslaved people also allegedly encoded directions to access the Underground Railroad in spirituals. Some historians posit that the song “Follow the Drinking Gourd” lays out the best time, season, and navigational method to reach freedom in the North. Regardless, the oral tradition was treasured. Enslaved Black people formed support systems and communal identities through it.
Although the Reconstruction era opened the written tradition up for African Americans, Watkins Harper still honors the oral tradition in “Learning to Read.” Uncle Caldwell’s clever hiding place for his book conceivably echoes the underdog trickster archetype popular in African American folktales.
Chloe, the poem’s speaker, addresses the reader in a conversational tone. The poem begins as if in the middle of a story. The use of “soon” indicates the previous event predicted or even directly caused Yankee teachers’ arrival (Lines 1-2). The adverb “very” modifies the “soon,” giving a sense of importance to some order of events that quickly resulted in the Yankees’ arrival (Lines 1-2).
Watkins Harper heightens the conversational tone by making Chloe appear comfortable enough with the reader to express sentiments that could draw the ire of white southerners. Chloe calls them “Rebs” instead of Confederates and relishes that they cannot stop the “Yankee teachers” from educating Black people (Lines 1-4, 25-28). However, she assumes the reader lacks familiarity with the context and timeline of the North’s educational programs. Chloe details why the North needed to establish schools for Black people in the South, the stakes of Black people’s access to education, their learning methods while enslaved, and her own success in education. Using these details, the reader assumingly inhabits the role of an outsider or a younger community member. By sharing these details to the reader through a poem, Chloe conserves history and provides hope, in the same way that those who lived and died during slavery used folktales. Watkins Harper takes a rich oral tradition and makes oral history, which is the documentation of lived experience by others (those who didn’t lived the experience).
