Up From Slavery: Metaphors 5 key examples

At the beginning of Up from Slavery, Washington explains how, as a child, he deeply craved an education, using a metaphor in the process:

I had no schooling whatever while I was a slave, though I remember on several occasions I went as far as the schoolhouse door with one of my young mistresses to carry her books. The picture of several dozen boys and girls in a schoolroom engaged in study made a deep impression upon me, and I had the feeling that to get into a schoolhouse and study in this way would be about the same as getting into paradise.

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Chapter 10 of Up from Slavery is titled “A Harder Task than Making Bricks without Straw,” an allusion to Exodus 5:7 from the Bible. Washington makes the allusion more explicit in the chapter itself when describing how he was faced with making the bricks for the Tuskegee Institute:

In the early days of the school I think my most trying experience was in the matter of brickmaking […] I had always sympathized with the “Children of Israel,” in their task of “making bricks without straw,” but ours was the task of making bricks with no money and no experience. In the first place, the work was hard and dirty, and it was difficult to get the students to help. When it came to brickmaking, their distaste for manual labour in connection with book education became especially manifest.

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When sharing his belief that Black Americans should prepare for slow and gradual political progress, Washington uses a metaphor about a gourd-vine, as seen in the following passage:

I believe it is the duty of the Negro—as the greater part of the race is already doing—to deport himself modestly in regard to political claims, depending upon the slow but sure influences that proceed from the possession of property, intelligence, and high character for the full recognition of his political rights. I think that the according of the full exercise of political rights is going to be a matter of natural, slow growth, not an over-night, gourd-vine affair.

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Throughout Up from Slavery, Washington includes documents penned by other people, such as letters sent to him from President Grover Cleveland and presidents of prestigious universities, as well as a full news article written by the journalist James Creelman about Washington’s Atlanta Exposition Address. It is worth looking at some of the literary devices Creelman uses in his article, as they reveal important information about the reception of Washington’s famous speech (which is the reason Washington says he includes the article).

In just the opening sentence of the article, Creelman uses both metaphors and an allusion:

While President Cleveland was waiting at Gray Gables to-day, to send the electric spark that started the machinery of the Atlanta Exposition, a Negro Moses stood before a great audience of white people and delivered an oration that marks a new epoch in the history of the South.

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When Washington's friends offer him and his wife an all-expenses-paid trip to Europe for three months—with the intention of having them rest and enjoy themselves—he is overwhelmed with gratitude and also concern for what will happen to the Tuskegee Institute while he is away. He describes his anxious attempts at resisting this incredible European tour offer, using a metaphor in the process:

I told these Boston friends that, while I thanked them sincerely for their thoughtfulness and generosity, I could not go to Europe, for the reason that the school could not live financially while I was absent. They then informed me that Mr. Henry L. Higginson, and some other good friends who I know do not want their names made public, were then raising a sum of money which would be sufficient to keep the school in operation while I was away. At this point I was compelled to surrender. Every avenue of escape had been closed.

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