Teddy and Booker T., page 2
Yet with freedom came uncertainty. Booker later recalled that at first, “there was great rejoicing, and thanksgiving, and wild scenes of ecstasy.” But the simple joy of the moment did not last for the newly freed people.
I noticed that by the time they returned to their cabins there was a change in their feelings. The great responsibility of being free, of having charge of themselves, of having to think and plan for themselves and their children, seemed to take possession of them. It was very much like suddenly turning a youth of ten or twelve years out into the world to provide for himself.[11]
ABC BREAKTHROUGH
While many formerly enslaved people had no choice but to remain where they were, becoming sharecroppers on terms dictated by their former slaveholders, Booker’s family went west. Jane took the reins of a wagon loaded with what few household goods and clothes they owned. Booker, John, and Amanda followed on foot. They walked some two hundred miles, crossing the Blue Ridge Mountains to reach their destination, a town called Kanawha Salines, West Virginia.[*] There, Jane was reunited with her husband, Wash Ferguson, who had escaped during the war.
“Uncle Wash,” as Booker called him, had found work in an industrial town along the Kanawha River that was one of the country’s major sources of salt. Dozens of great furnaces boiled the briny water that bubbled to the surface at a natural salt lick nearby. The evaporation process produced salt crystals that were much in demand downstream in Cincinnati’s pork-processing plants. Wash was among the unskilled laborers paid a small wage to compress the dried salt into barrels for shipment, and within days of their arrival, Booker and John were awakened before sunrise to trudge off with their stepfather for the 4:00 a.m. shift at the Snow Hill Furnace.
The family settled into a hovel only slightly better than their cabin in the quarter. This one, at least, had windows, but Booker thought little of the neighbors, whom he described as “the poorest and most ignorant and degraded white people.” The boy was disgusted by their “drinking, gambling, quarrels, fights, and shockingly immoral practices.”[12]
Every cent the boys earned went into Wash’s pocket, but Booker found an unexpected dividend in the work of shoveling and pounding salt. At the close of each shift, a supervisor came to inspect their day’s work. Booker noticed that he marked the barrels with the same two symbols. He soon learned they were numerals—a 1 and an 8—and that 18 was the number assigned to Wash Ferguson. “After a while,” Booker wrote much later, “[I] got to the point where I could make that figure, though I knew nothing about any other figures or letters.”[13]
The urge he had felt at the schoolhouse door in Hale’s Ford returned. “If I accomplished nothing else in life,” he resolved, “I would in some way get enough education to enable me to read common books and newspapers.”[14] After his mother managed to get him a worn copy of Noah Webster’s The American Spelling Book, he pored over the little blue-bound volume for hours. In a matter of weeks, he mastered much of the alphabet, but he had no one to teach him how to use these new tools to help him decode words. Schools for the formerly enslaved existed in some places, but education was still out of reach for many Black people. Yet the presence of a local school for Black children only added to Booker’s frustration because Wash refused to give him time off from the furnaces to attend. Once again, though, Jane found a solution, arranging for a few hours of evening instruction. Finally, she reached an understanding with her husband: If Booker worked two half shifts, one each before and after school, the boy could go to class.
When the roll was called on his first day, he noticed that the rest of children replied with two names. But he had just one. He thought fast, and by the time his turn came, “I calmly told him ‘Booker Washington,’ as if I had been called by that name all my life.” He was on his way to both literacy and becoming a self-made man.[*]
THE DEMANDING MRS. RUFFNER
Around the time of his twelfth birthday, Booker left the salt mines for a job working in the household of a former teacher, a Vermonter named Viola Knapp Ruffner. Miss Knapp had arrived in Kanawha Salines as a governess for Lewis Ruffner, a mill owner and one of the town’s richest men. Eventually, the widower Ruffner had asked Viola to marry him, and she became the lady of the house, helping manage his sizeable estate.
At first, Washington admitted, the well-to-do and educated White woman intimidated him. “[I] trembled when I went into her presence.” He knew that most of the other boys who previously worked for her lasted no more than two or three weeks and had grumbled that she was too strict and impossible to please. But as he struggled in the early days, determined to meet her rigid requirements, he recognized a simple fact: Yes, she had high standards, but that didn’t make her mean. As he explained later,
I had not lived with her many weeks . . . before I began to understand her. I soon began to learn that, first of all, she wanted everything kept clean about her, that she wanted things done promptly and systematically, and that at the bottom of everything she wanted absolute honesty and frankness.[15]
Before emancipation, the prevailing approach among slaveholders had been to discourage any sense of autonomy among the enslaved: Ignorance and dependence went hand in hand on the plantation. Teaching them to read and write had been forbidden in most Southern states—Virginia had passed one such law an 1831—and anything short of complete obedience was often met with whippings or other punishment. But when Mrs. Ruffner insisted Booker do things her way, he gradually recognized an open door. She didn’t want him merely to obey her orders; she wanted him to share her standards and independence, and Booker, reaching deep within himself, found a new self-discipline. The result was a fresh sense of himself, of what he could do, that she reinforced. She trusted him with added responsibilities—but he knew he had earned them.
Once a Black child to whom most White people paid little regard, Washington felt his view of himself change. If Mrs. Ruffner had opened a door, he chose to walk through it and to begin the process of remaking himself into a newly independent person. He would define himself and not be defined by others.
Booker moved into the Ruffner house. Together, he and Mrs. Ruffner raised vegetables and fruit, which they loaded into a wagon that he drove to and from nearby Charleston, selling the produce along the way. He handed over the money he collected. Since his duties didn’t keep him occupied every second, Mrs. Ruffner encouraged him to pursue his studies and allowed him to attend school in the afternoons. She tutored him at home, too. “I would help and correct,” she remembered, “and he was more than willing to follow direction. . . . He never needed correction or the word ‘Hurry!’ or ‘Come!’ for he was always ready for his book.”[16] While at Mrs. Ruffner’s, Booker began a lifelong habit of collecting books, storing the first ones in a dry-goods box he turned into bookshelves. Booker called his aging and lovely employer “one of my best friends.”[17]
As she helped him with his studies, Mrs. Ruffner saw in him a desire to succeed that perhaps Booker himself was just beginning to grasp. “He seemed peculiarly determined to emerge from his obscurity. He was ever restless, uneasy, as if knowing that contentment would mean inaction. ‘Am I getting on?’—that was his principal question.”[18]
And he certainly was “getting on.” Booker made more of the opportunity of the four formative years in Mrs. Ruffner’s employ than she or anyone expected. He adapted to her sense of thrift and her Yankee principles. He lost his plantation dialect, gaining a fluency in speaking and writing that enabled him to communicate effectively with educated people. And as he entered his middle teens, the dream taking shape in his mind grew larger. Might he truly raise himself up well beyond what even his mother might have hoped for her curious and clever middle child?
That idea was fostered by a conversation between two miners. Deep in a coal mine where he briefly worked digging coal to fire the salt furnaces, Booker overheard the men speaking of a new kind of educational institution, “[a] college that was more pretentious than the little coloured school in our town.”[19]
Moving with stealth in the dark of the mine, Booker crept quietly in the direction of the talking men. At the school, he learned, the students were also Black. It served not only those with money, but those without, seeking to teach them skills to advance themselves in post–Civil War society. The worthy student might work and study at a place the men called Hampton. To Booker, it sounded like “the greatest place on earth,” and he set his sights on enrolling in a school that welcomed Black students as hungry as he was for formal education—and a better life.
GIDEON’S BAND
The war was nearly five years in the past when Booker, still in the employ of the Ruffners, saw a stark sign that the divide between the races was far from resolved.
Saturday was payday in Kanawha Salines, and on December 4, 1869, a mix of strong drink, angry words, and racial hatred led to a fight between two miners. A Black man and a White man exchanged blows—but Preston, the Black man, “came out first best.”[20] To many a White Southerner, that was unacceptable.
When Preston heard that his humiliated White opponent had vowed revenge and was out to kill him, he swore out an arrest warrant. Fearing the law might trump their brand of vigilante justice, a group of the White man’s friends, members of an offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan called Gideon’s Band, let it be known that the Black man would not be permitted to attend the proceedings to make his case.
When trial day arrived, however, Preston walked into town surrounded by ten Black men armed with revolvers. When the Gideons confronted them, another fight broke out, and one member of Preston’s posse went to the ground, struck by a brick. When gunshots were exchanged, Preston and company sought cover nearby at Georges Creek Bridge.
Hearing the report of the guns, General Lewis Ruffner came running, with Booker just behind. Seeing the assembled Black men at the bridge, Ruffner ordered them to put down their guns. When they complied, he then approached the Gideons to broker a peace. He had stature in the town, having been a militia general and the delegate from Kanawha County at the convention to establish West Virginia as a state. But the White mob didn’t care, and one among the agitators lobbed another brick. He scored a direct hit, striking Ruffner above the ear. The old man collapsed to the ground, unconscious.
Two White men would sustain minor bullet wounds in the melee that followed, one in the arm, another in his leg. But no one died and, despite a grand jury investigation, no one, Black or White, went to jail. The Klan issued further threats of violence, but the only real casualty of the affair was General Ruffner. After helping carry the unconscious man back to his home, Booker had continued to work in the household, observing the general’s struggle to recover. But the seventy-two-year-old’s memory and vision were permanently diminished. He would never again be able to walk without crutches.
The traumatic scene at Georges Creek Bridge was seared into Booker’s memory: A peaceable man, a pillar of the town who wanted only fairness and justice, Ruffner had been assaulted and nearly murdered by a white supremacist mob. The anger and resentment Booker had seen in the crowd were such that, as a thirteen-year-old, he, despite his own emerging sense he could make something of himself, saw that the prospects for Black people were even bleaker than he had thought.
In Booker’s recollections, General Ruffner was an accidental victim. The goal of the Gideons had plainly been to intimidate the recently emancipated; the White men involved wanted “to crush out the political aspirations of the negroes.”[21] Their fear of the Black vote was such that, as one newspaper editor observed, the Klan wanted “to make things so hot among the darkies that they will have to leave.”[22]
Booker found a lesson in witnessing pure racial hatred firsthand. He would face it himself, again and again, in the years to come. He would fight back, whenever and however he could. Unlike the general, however, he recognized the need for less-confrontational strategies. He saw that General Ruffner had both failed in his effort to stand up for justice and been gravely injured trying. If a White man paid such a price, what would the cost be for a Black man? In time, Booker Washington would find ways to exercise a soft power uniquely his own.
chapter two
“TEEDIE” GROWS UP
I was a sickly, delicate boy, suffered much from asthma, and frequently had to be taken away on trips to find a place where I could breathe.
Theodore Roosevelt, An Autobiography, 1913
As a man, Theodore Roosevelt Jr. would change history. As a small boy known to his family as “Teedie,” he simply witnessed it.
In April 1865, the nation was in mourning: Just days after Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House, the sixteenth president had been assassinated at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C. Abraham Lincoln’s shocking murder reverberated across the country, and his remains, returning home by funeral train to Illinois, made stops in many cities along the way. New York was no exception, and on April 24, a long procession accompanying Lincoln’s casket marched north on Broadway, the street lined with thousands of mourners bidding their fallen leader a sad farewell.
Looking down from a second-story window of his grandfather’s home was Teedie Roosevelt, age six.
Abraham Lincoln would forever hold a place of admiration in the impressionable boy’s mind. As an adult, Roosevelt repeatedly called Lincoln “my great hero.” On the day of his 1905 inauguration, Roosevelt would wear a ring containing a snip of Lincoln’s hair. Behind his desk at the White House, the twenty-sixth president hung a large portrait of Lincoln.
Once, when asked about the picture by a reporter, Roosevelt replied that, upon being faced with a great problem, “I look up to that picture, and I do as I believe Lincoln would have done.”[1]
But that was four decades later, long after the boy had become the man. In childhood the biggest influence in Teedie’s life would be one of the saddened New Yorkers who marched in that funeral cortege, his father, Theodore Roosevelt Sr.
“I’LL MAKE MY BODY”
Born October 27, 1858, Theodore had been, in his mother’s words, a “most affectionate and endearing little creature.”[2] His family was well-to-do, his parents were loving, and Teedie seemed to have every advantage. But colds, stomach upsets, and fevers had become a way of life in early childhood, threatening to prevent the clever boy from living up to his potential.
At age three, he developed asthma; the attacks of breathlessness became so frequent and terrifying that he had a recurring nightmare of a werewolf coming for him from the foot of his bed. He had to sleep propped up. Then he began to experience acute bouts of diarrhea and vomiting, which his doctors called cholera morbus.[*] His health was so fragile that his parents feared he might not survive and chose to educate him and his siblings at home.
Theodore was fourteen and had suffered years of sickness when his father sat him down for a man-to-man conversation about his health. He was frank: “You have the mind, but you have not the body,” Theodore the elder told his namesake son. “Without the help of the body the mind cannot go as far as it should.”
As young teenager, the boy, as if channeling the man he would become, seemed ready—even happy—to rise to his father’s challenge. Throwing back his head, he smiled and looked his father in the eye. “I’ll make my body,” he promised.[3]
Over a period of months, Teedie set out to do exactly that with a rigorous program of lifting weights, wrestling, and boxing lessons at Wood’s Gymnasium, which catered to New York’s upper crust. Proprietor John Wood himself supervised the boy until his father, seeing his son’s seriousness and progress, equipped the back piazza at the Roosevelt row house with all the needed apparatus. Theodore persisted and, as one of his sisters observed, he “widen[ed] his chest by regular, monotonous motion—drudgery indeed.”[4]
He worked his mind, too, reading voraciously, his tastes varying from boys’ fiction to travel books and works on zoology and natural history. His effort at remaking himself meant he was ready to make the most of it when his father announced he was taking the family on a grand journey down the river Nile.
The two winter months, beginning in December 1872, would be some the happiest days of Theodore’s childhood. A new world opened to the fourteen-year-old. He wore a pair of spectacles, having just learned he was profoundly nearsighted. He walked the banks of the world’s longest river carrying his first gun, a double-barreled breechloader. Pursuing a great passion for natural history, he added more than a hundred specimens to his collection of stuffed birds. “This trip,” he recalled much later, “formed a really useful part of my education.”[5] He even mastered the craft of taxidermy, which, to the disgust of some members of his family, involved arsenic and the evisceration of his many kills.
Better yet, this would be a rare period of good health; with Teedie reveling in his freedom to roam the strange terrain, he built himself up in every way. The steady diet of yogurt and salads agreed with him, as did the dry desert air—not once did it rain during the Roosevelts’ Egyptian idyll.
They headed upstream in a chartered boat, the Aboo Erdan. It was named for a bird sacred to Egyptians, the ibis, one of which Teedie shot for his collection. He noted in his diary that the vessel was “the nicest, coziest, pleasantest little place you ever saw.”[6] The flat-bottomed and barge-like dahabeeyah was a craft like countless others that had cruised the Nile since the days of the pharaohs. Sailing at just two or three miles per hour, it carried the family from Cairo to the desert city of Aswan, a journey of six hundred miles, then back again. Each morning Teedie, brother Elliott or “Ellie,” not yet twelve, and the baby of the family, nine-year-old Corinne, known as “Conie,” sat for two hours of lessons. Their tutor was the eldest of the four Roosevelt children, “Bamie,” born Anna, who would soon turn eighteen. Once freed of his lessons, Teedie promptly went ashore, tracking birds, sometimes riding a donkey, exploring the groves of palms and dates.
