What sort of person writes fiction about the past? It is helpful to be acquainted with violence, because the past is violent … It is necessary to understand that the dead are real, and have power over the living. It is helpful to have encountered the dead firsthand, in the form of ghosts.

- The Dead are Real, Larissa MacFarquhar

Seldom in history have any people faced tasks so formidable and challenging as those which four million southern blacks confronted in the aftermath of the Civil War ... If the ex-slaves were to succeed, they would have to depend largely on their own resources.

– Leon F. Litwack, Been In The Storm So Long

Introduction 

In the immediate decades following the Civil War, the promise of reconstruction dissolved into disillusionment. Segregationist seeds were sewn deep within the war-furrowed communities of the Republic.

Eruptions of violence surged in pockets of the repairing nation as a new ethnic cleansing pogrom began to take root through legislated terror.

The resistance began to wield a subtle weapon in a new kind of warfare both as a defensive bulwark to resist apartheid, and as armament that would determine the fate of millions of southern African Americans: literacy.

“Pickaxe, rifle, shovel, pen: each a weapon I have used with deadly force. Pen preferred.” - Liberty adams

For many ex-slaves, literacy was the new underground railroad.

The freedom-key to navigating a hostile, post-Civil War world. Illiterate, an ex-slave was circumscribed to a life with limits, precisely the life that many Jim Crow southerners designed: separate and unequal. What ensued was a long, bitter struggle for intellectual equality, a battle fought by individuals whose self-reliance was founded on the crucible of perseverance yet whose indomitable spirit sustained perpetual assault.

This period between emancipation and the decades leading up to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960‘s remains a bilious, forgotten backwater in American history.

The story told in the following pages takes place during this lapse in our nation’s collective memory.

The life of Liberty Adams reveals a remarkable trail along actual events in history that demonstrate how the critical function of literacy and rights-to-opinion enabled equality and enraged opponents, erupting in brutal seasons of terror and bloodshed.

This narrative is not a polemic about slavery, nor yet another story about the Civil War, but rather a recollection, from a time largely forgotten, spoken through the life of one man, whose love of learning and decades of struggle embodied the battle for intellectual parity, a battleground where Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, even Melville, Milton, and Homer become able mentors along a treacherous path.

Because this story is told through the life of a self-educated slave whose ascension in a white-dominated world was battled primarily (but not solely) through literate means, I must invoke the words of Ralph Ellison whose masterpiece The Invisible Man provoked me when I first read it several years ago.

In the introduction, Ellison questioned why ‘most protagonists of Afro-American fiction, namely black characters in fiction written by whites, were ‘without intellectual depth,’ he continues:

Too often they were figures caught up in the most intense forms of social struggle, subject to the most extreme forms of the human predicament but yet seldom able to articulate the issues which tortured them. Not that many worthy individuals aren’t in fact inarticulate, but that there were, and are, enough exceptions in real life to provide the perceptive novelist with models. And even if they did not exist it would be necessary, both in the interest of fictional expressiveness and as examples of human possibility, to invent them.

When one considers the indomitable yearning for freedom deep-rooted in the human spirit, the portrayal of a self-educated ex-slave like Liberty Adams is not beyond the bounds of believability; the possibility of his existence shatters our shallow stereotypes.

Liberty’s life is, in fact, an impressionistic composite, one distinct diamond reflecting the facet of many lives, African American heroes such as the famed cowboy Nat Love (1854-1921), lions-of-letters and equal rights apologists such as Frances Harper (1825-1911), Ida B. Wells (1864-1931), the poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar (1872-1906) and more.

In her book Self-Taught (African American Education in Slavery and Freedom), Heather Andrea Williams wrote, ‘African Americans invested great faith in the ability of literacy first to enable them to escape from slavery, and then to make freedom meaningful in the emancipation period.’

A longing more profound than we can imagine stirred even the most timorous of freedman to risk a life toward fully recognized citizenship, an equality that the broken, yet unrepentant Republic, had once promised but repeatedly denied.

Liberty’s journey incarnates what the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa stated was ‘the fascination with human beings to do away with limits, who, instead of bowing to the servitude of what is possible, endeavor, against all logic, to seek the impossible.' 

It is also a quest for identity, what Ralph Ellison calls the American theme, ‘the nature of our society is such that we are prevented from knowing who we are.’

Though the end of the Civil War might have meant the abolition of physical slavery for millions, it was but the beginning of a long crusade for true independence: emancipation of the soul and mind.

- Bobby Lehew, 2015

Please note: In a desire to present an authentic portrayal of the turbulent times Liberty experienced, the use of racial slurs is prominent. Please know that they are used only in a desire to present the precise conditions of hate and ignorance that confronted Liberty.

Continue to Chapter One >