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

92 страница из 129

With his focus on citizenship, Washington constructs his autobiography, as did Franklin, primarily by working through his educational and business achievements, downplaying personal matters and intimate relationships (for instance, Washington names his wives but says very little about them). His discussions, following Franklin’s emphasis on the self-made man, typically focus less on the attainments themselves than on the efforts needed to achieve them. In describing how he overcame the many obstacles facing him, both as an individual and as a leader of Tuskegee (and more generally as one of the most important representatives of African Americans), Washington points to the two issues that best define the vision that everywhere shapes his autobiography: the importance of practical education and of meaningful labor—that is, of doing a job well.

Washington’s portrayal of his childhood and young adulthood concentrates on the incidents that bring him to understand the importance of education and work, which by the end of the autobiography become for all intents and purposes one and the same (work is education, education is work). No episode is more important than the young Washington’s employment by Mrs. Viola Ruffner, a Yankee whose exacting work standards had run off all of her previously hired helpers. Mrs. Ruffner demanded punctuality, honesty, and commitment; everything must run smoothly and orderly. No exceptions, no excuses. “The lessons that I learned in the home of Mrs. Ruffner,” Washington declares in Up From Slavery, “were as valuable to me as any education I have gotten anywhere else. . . . I never see a filthy yard that I do not want to clean it, a paling off of a fence that I do not want to put it on, an unpainted or unwhitewashed house that I do not want to paint or whitewash it, or a button off one’s clothes, or a grease-spot on them or on a floor, that I do not want to call attention to it” (44). Another formative event occurs when Washington shows up unannounced and un-admitted at Hampton Institute in Richmond (having struck out on his own from West Virginia, a journey paralleling Franklin’s youthful bolt from Boston to Philadelphia). He is eventually admitted to Hampton not because of classroom achievement but because of his meticulous sweeping up of a room. “The sweeping of that room was my college examination,” Washington writes, “and never did any youth pass an examination for entrance into Harvard or Yale that gave him more genuine satisfaction. I have passed several examinations since then, but I have always felt that this was the best one I ever passed” (Up From Slavery 53).