Читать книгу Constructing the Self. Essays on Southern Life-Writing онлайн

108 страница из 129

Washington’s understanding of the revolutionary potential of the artifact dovetails with his understanding of industrial education, as it too is best understood as a lever, as a tool for immediately improving blacks and eventually improving whites, as they come together to remake the South. “Our school is a lever which has made of several hundred young men and women levers in their turn to lift up their race,” Washington observes (Black-Belt Diamonds 13), acknowledging the first step in his vision—and version—of southern reconstruction. The second step would come later, over time. While Washington certainly misjudged white recalcitrance in acknowledging the humanity of blacks—or maybe he knew all along but didn’t want to let on publicly—he nonetheless constructed through his autobiographical writing a far-reaching and visionary plan for educating both blacks and whites for the remaking of the South into a better place for all its citizens.

And this returns us to Benjamin Franklin, who believed that to make the world a better place future people needed to be first and foremost toolmakers. Certainly both Franklin and Washington were just that, conceiving their autobiographies as tools for improving the lives of their readers. Franklin went so far as to configure himself metaphorically as a book that he, as a printer, could go back and edit, correcting what he called the errata of his life, in an endless process of self-improvement. When he was a young man, Franklin composed an epitaph for himself that drew upon the same metaphorical construction: