Learning to Read

To understand “Learning to Read,” readers need to understand the persona poem. When utilizing the persona poem form, writers construct a character separate from their usual authorial voice to narrate the poem. Persona relies heavily on characterization: the art of using context, actions, and details to define a character’s personality, values, and goals.

Writers build a fictional character or evoke a pre-existing figure for their personas. Pre-existing figures can include historical or contemporary people and characters from earlier stories and mythologies. Typically, persona poems can be a useful rhetorical device for poets.

Through the form, writers can draw parallels between themselves and the persona, thus getting at issues challenging to express directly. Alternatively, persona poems expose and contextualize particular worldviews or hold a mirror up towards the reader and society. Writers can collage a series of persona poems with a single speaker or many different ones to capture a larger story in poetry collections. Persona poems reveal contrasts and similarities between people or even add a sense of authority to a poet’s message.

Persona poetry as a technique to establish authority is especially pertinent to Watkins Harper’s construction of “Learning to Read.” As a Black woman born free, Watkins Harper never personally experienced slavery. As with many free Black people at the time, enslavement remained a possibility, and this said threat prevented Watkins Harper from returning to her home state of Maryland. Instead, she probably heard many traumatized individuals’ first-hand accounts from working on the Underground Railroad and her upbringing by her activist uncle in a pro-slavery state.

In order to more fully portray and advocate for Black women in the South, Watkins Harper creates Chloe Fleet. Chloe, appearing in six poems across Sketches of the Southern Life, survives enslavement.

“Learning to Read” highlights a victorious moment in Chloe’s life: when she acquires the ability to read. The first stanza contextualizes her victory. After the Civil War, Northerners moved south to help create schools for Black communities. The effort was vital since white enslavers and their sympathizers previously legally barred the establishment of schools open to Black people throughout the South.

The second stanza explains why “the Rebs did hate” these new schools (Lines 2-3). They feared literacy would provide more tools for the people they enslaved to counter or escape their rule. So white supremacists “always tried to hide / Book learning from our eyes” (Lines 5-6).

Chloe reveals in the third stanza that many Black people determinedly found ways to circumvent plantation owners and their allies’ attempts. The poem then honors fellow enslaved people’s bravery and will to learn. The two men Chloe discusses both had to pursue the written word covertly. By highlighting their methods, Chloe reminds the reader why legal, educational opportunities matter so much to Black people, especially those enslaved in the South. They no longer have to deface their books to keep them safe from white eyes (Lines 13-20), nor remain silent participants in learning (Lines 21-24) to stay safe.

While the seventh stanza repeats the first stanza’s information about Yankee teachers and the Rebs’ “sneer[s] and frown[s],” it also hints at the educational program’s success (Lines 25-28). The Northerners have set up the school and now have progressed to the point Chloe states they “helped us” (Lines 1-2, 27). The past tense of “helped” indicates that the program had tangible, positive results for the members of Chloe’s community.

In the poem’s final half, Chloe’s trajectory confirms that the Northerners’ help positively impacted the poem. Chloe links the Northerner teachers’ presence with her interest in reading the Bible through the conjunction “And” in the eighth stanza (Line 29). While people doubted her chances of success because of her age when she first started to learn, Chloe procures the tools she needs and dedicates her time to learning (Lines 32-40).

After becoming skilled enough to read the Bible proficiently, she “then” buys a cabin for herself (Lines 39-41). The “then” implies her literacy skills help obtain this purchase (Line 41). Chloe relishes and rejoices in her agency with the independence supported by her knowledge and property. By the last stanza, she feels as powerful as a queen (Lines 43-44).

Because Watkins Harper crafts Chloe as a first-person narrator, the Chloe Fleet poems gain urgency and a verisimilitude rather than feeling watered down and distant. Compare “And never stopped till I could read […] Then I got a little cabin / A place to call my own” to “And she never stopped till she could read…Then she got a little cabin / a place to call her own” (Lines 39, 41-42). Chloe’s achievement feels more triumphant and grounded when the reader hears it from her rather than interpreted by someone else.

Suppose Watkins Harper wrote the poem in the third person or through the first-person perspective of an outsider looking in. In that case, Uncle Caldwell and Ben might feel more hypothetical. Chloe’s familiarity and similar experiences make them feel more like people who truly existed.

Watkins Harper operates the persona poem to capture a significant cultural moment too. Watkins Harper uses her to encompass the hope many freed Black people felt as opportunities previously denied to them opened up following the Civil War. A first-person speaker fosters a closer connection between reader and speaker. In return, the connection allows the reader to understand better the exact ways a policy or event may affect a group of people. For Black Southern readers, they can see themselves represented in Chloe. For Black Northern readers, the poem could incentivize them to move south and teach. For white and nonblack readers, “Learning to Read” informs and persuades about the importance of education for Black people.