Booker T. Washington: A Private Life

1914, Tuskegee, Alabama

The Alabama heat pushes through the screens even when the blinds are lowered, and the fan only stirs papers that ought to have been answered yesterday. Letters from donors, trustees, students, critics, all of them come to the desk still expecting the old efficiency from a body that now bargains over each hour. The doctors speak softly in the passage. I know that softness; I have used its equivalent all my life when saying enough to calm men without conceding anything essential. It troubles me to hear it directed at me. Tuskegee spreads beyond the window as proof and accusation both. Brick, order, discipline, labour. Others are ready to turn all of it into doctrine once I am gone, as if every public sentence I uttered were the whole of my thought and not also a tactic, a shield, a price. My hand tires before the mind does. That is dangerous. If I leave these years to interpreters who admired my caution or despised it, they will make fatigue look like philosophy.