Douglass and Welty Frederick Douglass and Eudora

Douglass and Welty

Frederick Douglass and Eudora Welty came from two completely different environments. Douglass, a child of slaves, was abandoned when he was only six years old and discouraged to learn how to read. Throughout his life, he never forgot his feeling of abandonment. Welty had a happy childhood in a caring family that was passionate about books and reading. One of Welty's first memories was hearing her parents reading to each other from their favorite books. Despite these major differences in their upbringing, both Douglass and Welty used writing as a primary way of expressing their thoughts and ideas and became well-known authors in their own time as well as today, a century later.

It is difficult to understand how Frederick Douglass was motivated to became such an important author when reading his biography. His grandmother raised him until he was a very young child and then left him at his master's home in Maryland. She did not even tell him that this was going to happen. One can only imagine how alone he felt. Only two years later, he was sent to the city of Baltimore to become a houseboy with Hugh and Sophia Auld, relatives of his master. Once again he was living in a new environment with people he did not know. It must have been a very frightening time for him, although Douglass was fortunate that his mistress was a kind and tender-hearted woman. For the first time in his life, he was treated like a human being. The mistress even began to teach him the alphabet. Unfortunately, this did not last long. The mistress' husband told her that slaves could not be treated as equals. They cannot learn how to read. Not only did she stop teaching Douglass reading, but she even became angry when seeing him with a newspaper. Many children would have stopped learning. This was not the case with Douglass. The feelings of his master and mistress made him even more motivated to learn how to read, and he found any way he could to get lessons and worked very hard to learn and practice. He even tricked the ship carpenters to help him. As Douglass said about his learning at the ship-yard: "During this time, my copy-book was the board fence, brick wall, and pavement, my pen and ink was a lump of chalk." His motivation was so great, he wrote on whatever he could find and with whatever tool that would write.

How different the motivation to learn was for Eudora Welty. From the moment she was born, Welty was surrounded by sisters and parents who loved to read. In fact, if Welty's house caught on fire, her mother would have worried more about saving the books than herself. This passion for reading motivated Welty throughout her childhood. Unlike Douglass, she was treated very well and praised for learning. She did not have to overcome low self-confidence and find the internal motivation to read. Instead, she was encouraged externally by all the people in her life. Everyone she knew shaped her attitude and aptitude toward learning. Her parents would have been very upset if she did not want to read, and they did everything possible to advance her interest. Welty called her desire to learn "clamorous" or "insistent." "From the first I was clamorous to learn -- I wanted to know and begged to be told not so much what, or how, or why, or where, as when. How soon." She already knew the alphabet by the age of five and was very excited to go to school.

Douglass did not have a formal training like Welty, with a specific curriculum for learning. Instead, he had to find very informal and unusual ways to learn his alphabet and how to read. His mistress started teaching him, but he only learned a little before she stopped. As a result, Douglass had to develop his own curriculum. His first, and most effective, approach to learning was from the boys in the neighborhood: "The plan which I adopted, and the one by which I was most successful, was that of making friends of all the white boys whom I met in the street. As many of these I converted into teachers." (144). Douglass explained that he did not have specific times to learn, such as going to school every day. He learned whenever he could: "With their kindly aid, obtained at different times and in different places, I finally succeeded in learning to read. When I was sent on errands, I always took my book with me, and by doing one part of my errands quickly, I found time to get a lesson before my return" (144). Douglass also became good at learning how to barter for his reading lessons. "I used also to carry bread with me, enough of which was always in the house, and to which I was always welcome" (144). He would give the hungry boys bread, and in return they would "give me that more valuable bread of knowledge."

Welty's curriculum was through the formal institution of the school, not on the streets or at the ship-yard like Douglass. She started going to school at the age of five, after getting a foundation from her parents. During elementary school, she not only needed to learn how to write and read the words, but formal grammar. Welty wrote about Mrs. McWillie, a very stern teacher who could have been 100 years old and dressed in all black. She was a stickler for grammar, no matter if the child was in her class or not. One day Mrs. McWillie heard Welty and her friend talking in the bathroom and use the expression "might could." This was not acceptable. Welty admits that Mrs. McWillie never scared her into grammar, but instead it was the Latin curriculum that made her love grammar."It took Latin to thrust me into bona fide alliance with words in their true meaning. Learning Latin fed my love for words upon words..." (154).

Because Douglass learned to read in many unusual informal places, the type of teachers he had varied on the circumstances. He never went to school, and his mistress, who was the closest thing to a teacher, began to discourage his reading. As Douglass recalls: "She was an apt

woman; and a little experience soon demonstrated, to her satisfaction, that education and slavery were incompatible with each other" (144). Douglass' teachers thus became the boys in the streets, the carpenters at the ship-yard, the Irishmen unloading a boat, and the Webster's Spelling Book. He also copied the words that little Master Thomas wrote in his copy-book.