As Washington’s two caregivers with conflicting desires for their son, Washington’s mother and stepfather act as foils to each other in the early chapters of Up from Slavery. As Washington establishes early in the book, his mother was always supportive of his desire to get an education:
In all my efforts to learn to read my mother shared fully my ambition, and sympathized with me and aided me in every way that she could. Though she was totally ignorant, so far as mere book knowledge was concerned, she had high ambitions for her children, and a large fund of good, hard, common sense which seemed to enable her to meet and master every situation.
Here Washington explains how, even though his mother herself was uneducated, she wanted things to be different for her children. Even though the family had little money, she even bought Washington his first book and also made him a homespun cap so that he could match the other children when he was eventually able to start school.
Washington’s stepfather, on the other hand, was not at all interested in Washington getting an education, as he wanted his stepson to contribute to the family financially by working in the salt mines. As Washington explains, this led to one of the “keenest disappointments” of his life:
The opening of the school in the Kanawha Valley, however, brought to me one of the keenest disappointments that I ever experienced. I had been working in a salt-furnace for several months, and my stepfather had discovered that I had a financial value, and so, when the school opened, he decided that he could not spare me from my work. This decision seemed to cloud my every ambition. The disappointment was made all the more severe by reason of the fact that my place of work was where I could see the happy children passing to and from school, mornings and afternoons.
As this passage makes clear, Washington’s parents had contradictory desires for their son—his mother supported his desire for an education and his stepfather wanted him to work. While Washington was aligned with his mother, he also clearly learned a lesson from working in the mines alongside his stepfather—his educational philosophy always centered the combination of hard vocational labor and book learning.
