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

91 страница из 129

As is well known, Washington modeled Up From Slavery closely after Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, a move that not only elevated Washington’s stature but also, by implication, other southern blacks who followed in Washington’s footsteps. Franklin’s influence upon Up From Slavery is probably greater than even generally acknowledged, extending from broad conception down to specific narrative strategies and situations, including the text’s first sentence, “I was born a slave on a plantation in Franklin County, Virginia” (1). While of course Washington had no choice in deciding in what county he was born, he certainly had a choice, as James Olney has pointed out, in including its name in his autobiography’s opening words (11), a rhetorical move that heralds Franklin’s guiding presence. That presence is perhaps most apparent in Washington’s construction of Up from Slavery as a conduct book for productive citizenship, though not quite as obviously as Franklin’s. Franklin all but announces his edifying purpose by constructing Part One of his autobiography as a letter to his son, offering fatherly advice and eventually setting himself up as a model of civic duty and social responsibility, to be emulated not only by his son but, by implication, by all Americans. (Franklin doesn’t mention that by the time he began writing his autobiography in 1771, his son was already Royal Governor of New Jersey and obviously needed no such instruction.) Although not using the letter-to-a-child format, Washington nonetheless follows Franklin in presenting himself as a model of productive citizenship, one for blacks to emulate and for whites to admire—or, at least for whites to recognize that Washington, as a representative of black Americans, was a useful citizen, a successful businessman, and a prominent educator. He was not, in other words, what the prevailing racist ideology made of black men: dangerous beasts, un-educable and ravenous.