Not a slave, but a granddaughter of the enslaved, living under the laws that came after slavery to keep my ancestors as close to enslaved as possible. For the timeline: slavery officially ended in 1865, but the set of laws that the U.S. South put together to keep African Americans as close to enslaved as possible lasted another century. HOWEVER, close is not quite: my grandparents were not threatened with death for reading ... and so they got as far as Goethe, Shakespeare, and Voltaire in addition to reading the African American authors of the 19th and 20th centuries! Goethe and Shakespeare I came to know in my grandmother's house (my grandfather having passed on by then)! I was born in 1981, and by that time, my people had built their own schools and were allowed to go to public school across the country -- but even in Grandmother's time, African Americans had built their own colleges!