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In his autobiography, Booker makes clear his determination to learn and attend school at all costs, when possible attending day school and at other times going to night school in order to get as much education as he could. He is also one of the only child miners to talk about his fear of and distaste for the conditions of the mines.  Booker’s story happens to be a rare account given by a child miner that left the mines entirely before growing up.  

Frank Keeney, in contrast, related a childhood mining incident without addressing any fear he might have felt.  The tale leaves the reader with a feeling of toughness in adversity.  Keeney’s mother, on the other hand, while letting him work the mines out of need, expressed concern and worry for his safety.  

Adult miners would hardly acknowledge any emotional misgivings as they were part of a culture with long experience of danger and took pride in their toughness while also demanding better conditions.  As they fought for these improvements, they often argued it was for their children.  Booker’s story gives more emotional insight into what it can feel like to be a child laborer.

Regarding Booker’s earlier education Louis Harlan wrote:

…about a month after the arrival of Booker and his family, an eighteen-year-old, light-skinned Ohio youth also appeared in Malden. He boarded with Elder Rice [a baptist preacher], and when it was discovered that he could read and write he was hired to conduct a school financed by what little money the poor black people of Malden could pay him. Thus began the educational career of William Davis, Booker’s first teacher. Davis had been born at Columbus, Ohio, in 1846, and secured a fundamental education during his stay in Chillicothe from 1861 to 1863… He was eighteen years old and only five feet, seven inches tall, but the black people were so eager for a teacher that they agreed to try him.

At eighteen, Davis was already a disabled Civil War veteran having lost hearing in one ear.  Now you might wonder why an eighteen year old had the opportunity to learn to read and write when no one else did.  Let’s look at what we know:  He was a veteran who moved from the north in Ohio, he was light skinned and hadn’t been a slave.  So, what might you infer?

Harlan continues: 

The opening of the Tinkersville school appears to have been entirely a self-help enterprise by the poor black people of the village, without assistance from the local whites, the county or township board of education, or the newly established Freedmen’s Bureau in Washington. That the school began is explained partly by the eagerness of the freedmen for book learning and the teaching talent of William Davis, but certainly a crucial factor was the leadership of the Rev. Lewis Rice, the illiterate but wise counselor whose work for education and religion earned him the name of “Father Rice” throughout the Kanawha Valley. It was Rice’s own home which became the first schoolhouse of Tinkersville, his very bedroom being the classroom. He was accustomed to the inconvenience, for he had been doing it for his church meetings on Wednesday nights and Sundays. The bed was dismantled and removed to make room for three or four slab benches, hewn by hand and accommodating an average of ten persons each. Though a state law passed on February 25, 1865, required township boards of education to establish separate schools for colored children whenever their number exceeded thirty, the entire support of the Tinkersville school seems to have been borne by the parents.

When the Tinkersville school opened, Booker suffered a sharp disappointment when Wash Ferguson refused to allow him to attend. The stepfather decided either that he was too poor to allow his son to live at home without working or that children had economic value in the economy of the salt furnaces…. He dug deeper into the mysteries of his blue-back speller, and joined the night class that the enterprising Davis organized primarily for adults. Booker was tired by the time he got to school, but his desire to learn was so strong that he believed he learned more at night than more fortunate children did during the day. In his later educational career he would be a strong advocate of the night school.

*Yeah, we had to change the teacher out. Why?  We’re sticklers for accuracy, that’s why.  It turns out that Booker’s teacher in West Virginia was William Davis who was asked to teach when he moved to the Kanawha Valley at the age of 18 in 1865. So, definitely not an older woman.

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