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

The Path to Freedom
he ordered Sophia to stop. In Frederick's presence he
explained:
A nigger should know nothing but to obey his master - to do
as he is told to do. Learning would spoil the best nigger in the
world. Now, if you teach that nigger how to read, there would
be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave.
Auld chastised Sophia in this way as if Frederick Bailey were not
there in the room with them, or as if he were a block of wood.
But Auld had revealed to Bailey the great secret: 'I now
understood ... the white man's power to enslave the black man.
From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to
freedom.'
Without further help from the now reticent and intimidated
Sophia Auld, Frederick found ways to continue learning how to
read, including buttonholing white schoolchildren on the streets.
Then he began teaching his fellow slaves: 'Their minds had been
starved . . . They had been shut up in mental darkness. I taught
them, because it was the delight of my soul.'
With his knowledge of reading playing a key role in his escape,
Bailey fled to New England, where slavery was illegal and black
people were free. He changed his name to Frederick Douglass
(after a character in Walter Scott's The Lady of the Lake), eluded
the bounty hunters who tracked down escaped slaves, and became
one of the greatest orators, writers and political leaders in
American history. All his life, he understood that literacy had
been the way out.
For 99 per cent of the tenure of humans on earth, nobody could
read or write. The great invention had not yet been made. Except
for first-hand experience, almost everything we knew was passed
on by word of mouth. As in the game of 'Chinese Whispers', over
tens and hundreds of generations, information would slowly be
distorted and lost.
Books changed all that. Books, purchasable at low cost, permit
us to interrogate the past with high accuracy; to tap the wisdom of
our species; to understand the point of view of others, and not just
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