hing more of him and expected even less.
It is while he is in prison that he begins to see the fallacy of this way of life and the way it has been imposed on him without his awareness. He also becomes ashamed of his ignorance as another inmate, Bimbi, makes him see how little he knows and how much he needs to learn: "But every book I picked up had few sentences which didn't contain anywhere from one to nearly all of the words that might as well have been in Chinese" (Haley 171). He gets hold of a dictionary and learns the words one at a time, learning both to read and to write them as he goes through the dictionary. He copied the dictionary page by page, learning by doing, and he read copiously as he became better at understanding what he read, reading to the point of straining his eyes badly.
It is in these readings that he learns a lesson about the education he never received in the white schools
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