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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.
那时候麦克明维尔所有的学校对黑人学生实行种族歧视，贫穷的黑人学生要想学到一点东西就得发奋努力。我们的高中只比原先比较流行的红校舍稍微大一些，而图书馆更是严重不合格，它是如此之小，可以说，如果有两个学生同时在里面看书，一个学生要想翻页，另一个学生必须出去才能给他腾出空间。
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.
那时候我们这些黑人（人们叫我们“黑鬼”）是不准进市图书馆的，除非是去擦桌子、拖地。但是贝茜老师利用在南北战争前有良知的白人和有影响力的黑人所达成的某种秘密协议，设法不断地将图书从白人图书馆里偷运出来。正是通过这种方法，贝茜老师让我接触了勃朗特、拜伦、柯尔律治、济慈和丁尼生。贝茜老师曾经告诫我：“不读书就不会写作，不会写作的话你就有可能放弃理想了。”
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，只要是贝茜老师让我读的东西我都会去读，并且我会努力记住她让我记住的东西。45年后的今天，我仍然记着她的“生存准则”，比如说亨利·华兹华斯·朗费罗的“圣·奥古斯丁之梯”中的一段话：
The heights by great men reached and kept
伟人所能达到和保持的高度，
Were not attained by sudden flights.
并不是瞬时间就能抵达的。
But they, while their companions slept,
当同伴们都在休息时，
Were toiling upward in the night.
这些伟人却在艰难攀登。
