Literacy Through A Struggle

Kaitlyn Jackson

Unearthing Hidden Literacy: Seven Lessons I Learned in a Cotton Field by Lillie Gayle Smith was a pivotal reading that expressed just how much negative experiences can affect a person's literacy without their knowledge.  Smith told the audience about her childhood of picking cotton in her aunt's field in Alabama.  From the beginning, I noted how much she hated the experience because it just made her a part of a long line of cotton picking African Americans.  Although, as she grew older, she learned in a course titled "Black Women's Literacy"(Smith 37) that her experience actually contributed to her literacy and lifestyle even as a graduate student.  Smith wrote that, cotton picking and slavery had their positive impacts on African American women because these negative, low class actions made them stronger as a race and a sex, than the women who were not working hard to achieve their already positive place in society.
In discussing the struggles of African American women, Smith also discussed the negative treatment of women as a whole.  One of her examples that really struck me was the example involving a male teacher giving the male students special treatment.  The female students dared not address the teacher directly and, instead, chose to drop the class or accept that they would not be equally treated.  At first, I thought that these actions did not help the students achieve the desired goal of being treated equally.  They were giving the teacher exactly what he wanted, a class full of men.  But, as Smith explained, "I now view them as forms of oppositon against the education system where they feel  degraded and diminished"(p.39).  The women of that class thought that they could be valued and treated equally elsewhere.  I learned that if this man could not give them the education that they deserved, these women would find it in someone who was willing to.
Towards the end of her article, Smith realized that her experience in the cotton fields not only contributed to her literacy, but to the literacy of others.  It is for that reason that she decided to look back on it, learn from it and share it with others.  It was from the elders of the cotton fields that she learned the most.  She learned respect, responsibility and religion from them.  They had been active in the Civil Rights Movement and it was those elders that she and the other children looked up to.  Yes, Lillie Gayle Smith was picking cotton, just as African Americans before her had for centuries, but she was also gaining the same literacy as they had through the struggle.