Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD
alike, from courthouse and statehouse, the notion that they were
hereditary inferiors, that God intended them for their misery. The
Holy Bible, as countless passages confirmed, condoned slavery. In
these ways the 'peculiar institution' maintained itself despite its
monstrous nature - something even its practitioners must have
glimpsed.
There was a most revealing rule: slaves were to remain illiterate.
In the antebellum South, whites who taught a slave to read
were severely punished. '[To] make a contented slave,' Bailey
later wrote, 'it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is
necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as
possible, to annihilate the power of reason.' This is why the
slaveholders must control what slaves hear and see and think. This
is why reading and critical thinking are dangerous, indeed subversive,
in an unjust society.
So now picture Frederick Bailey in 1828 - a 10-year-old
African-American child, enslaved, with no legal rights of any
kind, long since torn from his mother's arms, sold away from the
tattered remnants of his extended family as if he were a calf or a
pony, conveyed to an unknown household in the strange city of
Baltimore, and condemned to a life of drudgery with no prospect
of reprieve.
Bailey was sent to work for Capt Hugh Auld and his wife,
Sophia, moving from plantation to urban bustle, from field
work to housework. In this new environment, he came every
day upon letters, books and people who could read. He
discovered what he called 'this mystery' of reading: there was a
connection between the letters on the page and the movement
of the reader's lips, a nearly one-to-one correlation between the
black squiggles and the sounds uttered. Surreptitiously, he
studied from young Tommy Auld's Webster's Spelling Book.
He memorized the letters of the alphabet. He tried to understand
the sounds they stood for. Eventually, he asked Sophia
Auld to help him learn. Impressed with the intelligence and
dedication of the boy, and perhaps ignorant of the prohibitions,
she complied.
By the time Frederick was spelling words of three and four
letters, Captain Auld discovered what was going on. Furious,
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