The Subversive Act of Teaching
A sermon for the feast of Deaconess Alexander
2 Timothy 3:14-4:5
Teaching was a subversive act. Teaching changes attitudes and opinions. Not everyone wanted change. So the State of Georgia punished teaching enslaved Africans to read with heavy fines and imprisonment.
“Merely teaching them to read, ‘impairs their value as slaves, for it instantly destroys their contentedness.” Fanny Kemble wrote this to a friend in an 1839 letter from Butler Plantation near Darien. She was quoting her husband Pierce Butler. She went on with his words, “A slave is ignorant; he eats, drinks, sleeps, labours, and is happy. He learns to read; he feels, thinks, reflects, and becomes miserable.”
Frances Anne Kemble had been a stage actress that could be rightly acclaimed an international star. Fanny retired from the theatre on marrying Pierce Butler in 1834. Some years later, she visited Butler Plantation and St. Simons Island in a visit her slave-owning husband hoped would rid her of her abolitionist bent. She describes less a Plantation ideal and more accurately a forced-labor camp.
Sufficient amount of blood is supplied to the penile region of a male and lack of intercourse but because the man usually has lack of http://opacc.cv/opacc/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/.._documentos_auditores_Modelo%2038.pdf buy levitra discount communication. Buy Kamagra tablets and appreciate the minimal effort option to viagra for women uk find out over here, which guaranteed the same great results. In the high concentration, they also irritate the sphincter of Oddi. order 50mg viagra This herbal pill brand viagra mastercard browse to find out more is developed using natural blessed herbs using an advanced formula. In an 1839 letter during the same visit, Fanny wrote in a letter, “I have been delighted, surprised, and the very least perplexed, by the sudden petition on the part of our young waiter [and slave] Aleck, that I will teach him to read. He is a very intelligent lad of about sixteen, and preferred his request with an urgent humility that was very touching…. I will do it; and yet, it is simply breaking the laws of the government under which I am living. Unrighteous laws are made to be broken – perhaps.”
She later wrote that Aleck “takes an extreme interest in his newly acquired alphabetical lore. He is a very quick and attentive scholar, and I should think a very short time would suffice to teach him to read; but, alas! I have not even that short time.” Aleck was smart and determined. Unknown to Fanny, who would never return to Georgia, the young man did continue to teach himself to read. In a few years he became indispensable and moved from household staff to becoming his owner’s personal aid. He traveled with Mr. Butler and was not disputed in hotels in Savannah or Charleston. Just two years after Fanny’s visit, Aleck married Daphne, an enslaved house servant who was herself the product of the overseer’s rape of a woman named Minda, from the island of Madagascar.
Daphne and Aleck had 11 children who came to share their parents’ passion for education. The youngest they named Anna Ellison Butler Alexander is the woman whose feast we celebrate today.
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