Early in Up from Slavery, Washington uses imagery to capture the agony of putting on a shirt made of flax—the only shirt he was allowed to wear while enslaved:
I can scarcely imagine any torture, except, perhaps, the pulling of a tooth, that is equal to that caused by putting on a new flax shirt for the first time. It is almost equal to the feeling that one would experience if he had a dozen or more chestnut burrs, or a hundred small pin-points, in contact with his flesh. Even to this day I can recall accurately the tortures that I underwent when putting on one of these garments. The fact that my flesh was soft and tender added to the pain. But I had no choice.
The imagery here captures the pain of Washington’s experience with the shirt, as he compares wearing it to “the pulling of a tooth” and having “a dozen or more chesnut burrs, or a hundred small pin-points, in contact with his flesh.” This language encourages readers to truly feel the pain alongside him. His descriptions are not merely sensory, but they are also in a language that his readers can understand (as it’s unlikely that they have experience with flax shirts firsthand).
Moment like this are also examples of ethos as they establish for readers Washington’s authority—as a Black man who went from experiencing the horrifying realities of slavery to becoming a successful educator and public intellectual, Washington proves his own point that hard work guarantees success. This moment highlights the truth in Washington’s theory on meritocracy—if he was able to survive the tortures of slavery and become an accomplished educator and writer, then anyone can (if, like him, they work hard enough).
When describing the pressure that he felt to ensure that the Tuskegee Institute was successful as the first large educational institution founded by and for Black Americans, Washington uses imagery:
I knew that if we failed it would injure the whole race. I knew that the presumption was against us. I knew that in the case of white people beginning such an enterprise it would be taken for granted that they were going to succeed, but in our case I felt that people would be surprised if we succeeded. All this made a burden which pressed down on us, sometimes, it seemed, at the rate of a thousand pounds to the square inch.
The imagery in this passage comes at the end when, in describing the burden he felt at the time of Tuskegee’s founding, Washington writes how it “pressed down on us […] at the rate of a thousand pounds to the square inch.” This description helps readers to truly feel the weight of this burden, as 1000 pounds per square inch is an enormous amount of force.
Though a major tenant of Washington’s theory of racial uplift is that hard work guarantees success for people across all races, this passage is one of the few moments in which Washington acknowledges that Black Americans face particular burdens that white people do not. Unlike white Americans, Washington and the other Tuskegee founders must carry the knowledge that if they failed “it would injure the whole race.” The imagery of a literal crushing burden helps the reader relate to the degree of pressure they felt.
