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In those days the McMinnville school system was rigidly "Jim Crow," and poor black children had to struggle to put anything in their heads. Our high School was only slightly larger than the once-typical little red schoolhouse, and its library was outrageously inadequate—so small, I like to say that if two students were in it and one wanted to turn a page, the other one had to step outside.
那時候麥克明維爾所有的學校對黑人學生實行種族歧視，貧窮的黑人學生要想學到一點東西就得發奮努力。我們的高中只比原先比較流行的紅校舍稍微大一些，而圖書館更是嚴重不合格，它是如此之小，可以說，如果有兩個學生同時在里面看書，一個學生要想翻頁，另一個學生必須出去才能給他騰出空間。
Negroes, as we were called then, were not allowed in the town library, except to mop floors or dust tables. But through one of those secret Old South arrangements between whites of conscience and blacks of stature, Miss Bessie kept getting books smuggled out of the white library. That is how she introduced me to the Brontes, Byron, Coleridge, Keats and Tennyson. "If you don't read, you can't write, and if you can't write, you might as well stop dreaming," Miss Bessie once told me.
那時候我們這些黑人（人們叫我們“黑鬼”）是不準進市圖書館的，除非是去擦桌子、拖地。但是貝茜老師利用在南北戰爭前有良知的白人和有影響力的黑人所達成的某種秘密協議，設法不斷地將圖書從白人圖書館里偷運出來。正是通過這種方法，貝茜老師讓我接觸了勃朗特、拜倫、柯爾律治、濟慈和丁尼生。貝茜老師曾經告誡我：“不讀書就不會寫作，不會寫作的話你就有可能放棄理想了。”
So I read whatever Miss Bessie told me to, and tried to remember the things she insisted that I store away. Forty-five years later, I can still recite her "truths to live by," such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's lines from "The Ladder of St. Augustine":
因此，只要是貝茜老師讓我讀的東西我都會去讀，并且我會努力記住她讓我記住的東西。45年后的今天，我仍然記著她的“生存準則”，比如說亨利·華茲華斯·朗費羅的“圣·奧古斯丁之梯”中的一段話：
The heights by great men reached and kept
偉人所能達到和保持的高度，
Were not attained by sudden flights.
并不是瞬時間就能抵達的。
But they, while their companions slept,
當同伴們都在休息時，
Were toiling upward in the night.
這些偉人卻在艱難攀登。
