Time & Perspective Quote by Jupiter Hammon

A blunt line with the urgency of a survival tip, Hammon's advice lands like something smuggled out of a locked room: treat reading as the most precious use of your hours. Coming from Jupiter Hammon, an enslaved Black poet writing in colonial and early American New York, the sentence carries a double charge. On its surface, it sounds like thrift-minded self-improvement. Underneath, it's a quiet strategy for autonomy in a world built to deny it.

The phrasing matters. "Let all the time you can get" assumes time is scarce, borrowed, monitored. For enslaved people, time was literally owned by someone else; the small margins of the day were the only negotiable territory. Hammon doesn't romanticize learning as enlightenment. He frames it as disciplined theft from the system: reclaim minutes, convert them into literacy.

"Trying to learn" is also a protective choice. It's modest, almost deferential, which reads as rhetorical camouflage. In a society where Black literacy was often feared and sometimes criminalized, the safest way to argue for it was as moral improvement rather than political empowerment. Yet literacy is never just private. Reading opens contracts, scripture, laws, newspapers; it teaches the texture of power and the vocabulary to contest it.

Hammon, known for religious verse and exhortation, uses the accepted language of piety and self-discipline to push a radical implication: if you can read, you can interpret the world for yourself. The line's restraint is the point. It's not a manifesto. It's a key, passed hand to hand, that fits more doors than it admits.