Reading as rebellion: the history behind Lyddie's Ezekial

In chapter six of Katherine Paterson's novel Lyddie, the girl comes home to her family's empty Vermont farmhouse and finds a stranger hiding in it. Ezekial has escaped slavery in the South and is making for Canada; the Stevens family next door hid him until they feared their farm was watched, then moved him to Lyddie's empty cabin to recover from an illness. He taught himself to read, became a preacher, and decided — reading the Bible for himself — that he had to take his freedom. Lyddie, who had thought of turning him in for the reward, gives him the money from selling her calf instead, loses her job at the tavern for being absent, and sets off to become a mill girl in Lowell.

The chapter raises three historical questions a reader can check against the record.

Could enslaved people read?

Mostly not, and by design. Enslavers feared that literacy — and being able to read the Bible without a master's interpretation — would feed the wish to be free and give people the means to escape: a forged pass was a written thing. After Nat Turner, an enslaved preacher who could read, led a revolt in Virginia in 1831, many slave states passed laws forbidding anyone to teach Black people, free or enslaved, to read or write.

People learned anyway, in secret and at a price. Frederick Douglass described it in his Narrative (1845): his mistress in Baltimore began teaching him the alphabet, until her husband forbade it —

"…telling her, among other things, that it was unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave to read… and the argument which he so warmly urged, against my learning to read, only served to inspire me with a desire and determination to learn."

Formerly enslaved people later told of trading food, money, marbles or boxing lessons for letters; of carrying a primer under a hat to be ready for any lesson; of a mother who kept a schoolbook hidden in her clothes and asked white children what they had learned each day, and who taught school once slavery ended. The historian Heather Andrea Williams gathered those accounts in Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom (2005).

How could people be free inside bondage?

Escape was open to very few: it took physical strength, usually meant being held near a free state, and those caught faced brutal punishment. So freedom was also claimed in what could not easily be controlled — faith, thought, imagination, family ties, the customs of a homeland, and small acts of resistance.

The narrative of Henry Watson, a fugitive slave, published in Boston by Bela Marsh. Library of Congress.

The narratives written by people who did escape describe the hope surviving that. Henry Watson wrote that his wish for freedom was "suppressed only, and it grew stronger from being suppressed". William Wells Brown, working as a steamboat waiter, watched passengers who "could go where they pleased" and thought of stepping off at a landing and making for Canada; he escaped at nineteen and became a leading abolitionist writer in Boston.

Did Quakers help?

Many did, though not all, and not always. The Society of Friends taught that slavery was a moral wrong and that all people were equal; it has no clergy and rejects hierarchy.

George Keith's 1693 pamphlet urging Friends not to buy or keep enslaved people.

Historians of the Quakers have also warned against the "good Quaker" myth: many Friends took no part in antislavery work, Quaker meetings were not free of racism, and the legend tends to understate what freedom seekers and Black communities did for themselves.

Pictures

The stock woodcut printed on newspaper notices offering rewards for people who had escaped.

Routes freedom seekers took north. NPS.

For discussion

• What did Ezekial mean when he told Lyddie, "I hope you find your freedom as well"?
• How did the Stevens family help freedom seekers, and what were they risking?
• Lyddie was trying to pay off the family farm's debt. Why might she give all her money to a stranger?

Sources

Written from "Lyddie: Chapter 06 – Ezekial", part of the National Park Service's Books to Parks series for Lowell National Historical Park, a work of the United States government in the public domain. Quotations are from Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845); Narrative of Henry Watson, a Fugitive Slave (Boston: Bela Marsh); and William Wells Brown, Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave (1847), all in the public domain.