CHAPTER I.

FIRST NOTIONS of AFRICA
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     SOME years ago, in a book called "Up From Slavery," I tried to tell the story of my own life.  While I was at work upon that book the thought frequently occurred to me that nearly all that I was writing about myself might just as well have been written of hundreds of others, who began their life, as I did mine, in slavery.  The difficulties I had experienced and the opportunities I had discovered, all that I had learned, felt and done, others likewise had experienced and others had done.  In short, it seemed to me, that what I had put into the book, "Up From Slavery," was, in a very definite way, an epitome of the history of my race, at least in the early stages of its awakening and in the evolution through which it is now passing.
     This thought suggested another, and I asked myself why it would not be possible to sketch the history of hte Negro people in America in much the same way that I had tried to write the story of my

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own life, telling mostly the things that I knew of my own personal knowledge or through my acquaintance with persons and events, and adding to that what I have been able to learn form tradition and form books.  In a certain way the second book, if I were able to carry out my design, might be regarded as the sequel of the first, telling the story of a struggle through two and one-half centuries of slavery, and during a period of something more than forty years of freedom, which had elsewhere been condensed into the limits of a single lifetime.  This is, then, the task which I have set myself in the pages which follow.
     There comes a time, I imagine, in the life of every boy and every girl, no matter to what race they belong, when they feel a desire to learn something about their ancestors; to know where and how they lived, what they suffered and what they achieved, how they dressed, what religion they professed and what position they occupied in the larger world about them.  The girl who grows up in the slums of a large city, the Indian out in the wide prairie, the “poor white” boy in the mountains of the Southern states, and the ignorant Negro boy on a Southern plantation, no matter how obscure their origin, each will feel a special interest in the people whose for tunes he or she has shared, and a special sympathy with all that people have lived, and suffered and achieved

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     The desire to know something of the country from which my race sprang and of the history of my mother and her people came to me when I was still a child.  I can remember, as a slave, hearing snatches of conversation from the people at the “Big House” from which I learned that the great white race in America had come from a distant country, from which the white people and their forefathers had travelled in ships across a great water, called the ocean. As I grew older I used to hear them talk with pride about the history of their people, of the discovery of America, and of the struggles and heroism of the early days when they, or their ancestors, were fighting the Indians and settling up the country.  All this helped to increase, as time went on, my desire to know what was back of me, where I came from, and what, if anything, there was in the life of my people in Africa and America to which I might point with pride and think about with satisfaction.
     My curiosity in regard to the origin and history of the dark-skinned people to which I belong, led me at first to listen and observe and then, later, as I got some schooling and a wider knowledge of the world, to inquire and read.  What I learned in this way only served, however, to increase my desire to go farther and deeper into the life of my people, and to find out for myself what they had been in Africa as well as in America.
     What I was first able to hear and to learn did not,

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I confess, take me very far or give me very much satisfaction.  In the part of the country in which I lived there were very few of my people who pretended to know very much about Africa.  I learned, however, that my mother's people had come, like the white people, from across the water, but from a more distant and more mysterious land, where people lived a different life from ours, had different customs and spoke a different language from that I had learned to speak.  Of the long and terrible journey by which my ancestors came from their native home in Africa to take up their life again beside the white man and Indian in the New World, I used to hear many and sinister references, but not until I was a man did I meet any one, among my people who knew anything definite, either through personal knowledge or through tradition, of the country or the people from whom my people sprang.  To most of the slaves the “middle passage," as the journey from the shore of Africa to the shore of America was called, was merely a tradition of a confused and bewildering experience, concerning whose horrors they had never heard any definite details.  Nothing but the vaguest notions remained, at the time I was a boy, even among the older people in regard to the mother country of my race.
     In slavery days the traditions of the people who lived in the cabins centred almost entirely about the lives and fortunes of the people who lived in the

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to me, they need to bring out and develop the best that is in them.
     So it was that, thinking and studying about

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knew a great deal about the local history of New England and were perfectly familiar with the story of Plymouth Rock and the settlement of Jamestown, and of all that concerned the whiteman's civilisation both in America and out of America.  But I found that through their entire course of training, neither in the public schools, nor in the fitting schools, nor Harvard, had any of them had an opportunity in to study the history of their own race.  In regard to the people with which they themselves were most closely identified, they were more ignorant than they were in regard to the history of the Germans, the French, or the English.  It occurred to me that this should not be so.  The Negro boy and girl should have an opportunity to learn something in school about his own race.  The Negro boy should study Negro history just as the Japanese boy studies Japanese history and the German boy studies German history.
     Let me add that my knowledge of the Negro has led me to believe that there is much in the story of his struggle, if one were able to tell it as it deserves to be told, that it is likely to be both instructive and helpful, not merely to the black man but also to the white man with whom he is now almost everywhere, in Africa as well as America, so closely associated.  In the last analysis I suppose this is the best excuse I can give for undertaking to tell “The Story of the Negro.”

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