It's remarkable to compare the endings of two powerful American autobiographies published 100 years apart, in 1845 and 1945. Both contain accounts of great struggles by the authors to be able to read--Frederick Douglass first needing great presence of mind, strategy, trickery, and secrecy as a young enslaved person to essentially teach himself to read without letting anyone around him see what he was doing, and Richard Wright employing similar skills to gain access to a public library's collection and advance his own education. Both young men had a profound hunger for knowledge of the world that could make a different in the progress of their own lives in a deeply racist country.

The sections in which Douglass tricks neighborhood boys to show him letter combinations and Wright tricks a librarian into giving him books that, he says, are going to be read by a white man, not by Wright himself are well worth a close reading. But there at the end of each book, as both young men have escaped their dismal lives in the South, they both choose to conclude by talking about literacy, widely understood. It is as if they both saw their own progress in life as a literacy narrative, as a story about how a life unfolds as a person's literacy skills unfold. As if the two cannot truly be disentangled, and as if a democracy only makes sense if the strands remain interwoven.

Literacy, narrowly defined as the ability to read and write, won't explain it. But broadly understood: skills of reading, writing, and public speaking; the ability to know the world more fully as a result; the ability to engage others more fully as a result; the personal hopes that can be nurtured thereby; the wider social hopes that have a chance to be spoken and written slowly into existence thereby. Things like that. For neither Douglass or Wright is literacy the simple ability to read and write. Just as democracy is hobbled when we think of it as little more than elections, literacy is hobbled by a narrow definition or a narrow understanding. These familiar things, literacy, democracy, are deeper than we commonly remember.