In the American South before the Civil War, for instance, it was illegal in some states to teach enslaved people to read and write.

The human voice is just a sound in the air, and yet it has built bridges from ignorance to knowledge, and from bondage to freedom. What happened to Hurston that night was a kind of intellectual and aesthetic liberation: the sound of her teacher reading Coleridge was so thrilling, so arresting, that it cut her loose from the life she might have had and freed her to find her destiny as a writer.Īt other times in history, and in other places, reading aloud has been the means of more literal liberation. This was my world, I said to myself, and I shall be in it, and surrounded by it, if it is the last thing I do on God’s green dirt-ball.” I was not of the work-a-day world for days after Mr. “Listening to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Kubla Khan for the first time, I saw all that the poet had meant for me to see with him, and infinite cosmic things besides. Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree Īnd here were forests ancient as the hills, With walls and towers were girdled round Īnd there were gardens bright with sinuous rills, One fateful evening, this teacher opened a volume of English poetry and began to read to the class: His high-bridged, but sort of bent nose over his thin-lipped mouth-well, the whole thing reminds you of some Roman like Cicero, Caesar or Virgil in tan skin.” He is not a pretty man, but he has the face of a scholar, not dry and set like, but fire flashes from his deep-set eyes.

In her memoir, Dust Tracks on a Road, Hurston wrote, “There is no more dynamic teacher anywhere under any skin. Hurston had enrolled in a night high-school English class taught by a man named Dwight O. It can also dash forward and strike with a blow, as it did one night in 1917 to the future novelist and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston. The enchantment of a piece of writing delivered by the human voice may come on little cat feet, so to speak, slipping in so softly that we hardly notice its arrival.

The enchanted hour by meghan cox gurdon