Learning to Read in the Cold

“The unfolding of your words gives light; it imparts understanding to the simple.” — Psalm 119:130 (ESV)

Add up all the schooling Amanda Smith ever got and it comes to about three months. Three months, across her whole childhood. It was not because she was slow or lazy. It was because school, for a Black girl in her time and place, was something handed out in leftovers.

Her first real lessons she gave herself. Her father brought home newspapers, and Amanda cut out the large letters, laid them on the windowsill, and asked her mother to help her arrange them into words. She never forgot the day she first read a line on her own — “The house, the tree, the dog, the cow.” She called the other children over to show them. She thought she knew everything.

Later she and her brother had to walk about five miles to a school that took a few Black children. One bitter winter morning the snow was deep and the cold was dangerous. Her mother was afraid she would freeze and did not want her to go; Amanda insisted, bundled up, wearing her brother’s heavy boots. Halfway there the cold got into her and, wrapped so tightly she could barely move, she nearly froze on the road. She was too stubborn, and too afraid of being kept home, to turn back. By the time she reached the schoolhouse door she could not open it and could not speak; a boy had to let her in, and people worked over her a long time before she came to.

And after a walk like that? At the school the white children got their full lessons first. If any time was left over, the Black children got a turn. Many days Amanda made that miles-long trip and got exactly one lesson — squeezed in while everyone else was packing up their lunch pails to go home.

Sit with how unfair that is, because it is important not to smooth it over. She was just as capable and just as hungry to learn as any child in that room, and she was made to wait for the scraps of the school day because of her skin. That is the injustice she grew up inside of. And here is the part worth admiring: it did not kill her hunger to learn. She taught herself letters off a windowsill. She read her Bible until it argued back at her. As a grown woman she crossed oceans, spoke to crowds, and kept a diary on three continents — this person the system had decided did not deserve a full day of school.

You may have gotten a bad deal in some direction — a school that is failing, teachers who wrote you off, a home where studying is hard, a subject people said your “kind” of person does not do. That deal is real, and naming it is not making excuses. But Amanda draws a hard line between a bad deal and a dead end. What was handed to her was a bad deal. What she did with it was refuse to let it become a dead end. Nobody could give her a fair classroom. Nobody could stop her from cutting letters out of a newspaper.

One thing to do: pick one thing you have decided you “can’t” learn because school made it miserable — reading real books, math, writing, an instrument. Teach yourself the very first piece of it this week, on your own, for fifteen minutes, the way Amanda taught herself letters. Prove to yourself the door is not actually locked.