| | 1 | Author: | Davis, Rebecca Harding, 1831-1910 | Add | | | Title: | Blind Tom  | | | | Published: | 1996 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | SOMETIME in the year 1850, a tobacco-planter in Southern
Georgia (Perry H. Oliver by name) bought a likely negro woman
with some other field-hands. She was stout, tough-muscled,
willing, promised to be a remunerative servant; her baby, however,
a boy a few months old, was only thrown in as a makeweight to the
bargain, or rather because Mr. Oliver would not consent to separate
mother and child. Charity only could have induced him to take the
picaninny, in fact, for he was but a lump of black flesh, born blind,
and with the vacant grin of idiocy, they thought, already stamped on
his face. The two slaves were purchased, I believe, from a trader: it
has been impossible, therefore, for me to ascertain where Tom was
born, or when. Georgia field-hands are not accurate as Jews in
preserving their genealogy; they do not anticipate a Messiah.
A white man, you know, has that vague hope unconsciously latent
in him, that he is, or shall give birth to, the great man of his race, a
helper, a provider for the world's hunger: so he grows jealous with
his blood; the dead grandfather may have presaged the possible son;
besides, it is a debt he owes to this coming Saul to tell him whence
he came. There are some classes, free and slave, out of whom
society has crushed this hope: they have no clan, no family-names
among them, therefore. This idiot-boy, chosen by God to be
anointed with the holy chrism, is only "Tom,"—"Blind Tom," they
call him in all the Southern States, with a kind cadence always,
being proud and fond of him; and yet—nothing but Tom? That is
pitiful. Just a mushroom-growth,—unkinned, unexpected, not hoped
for, for generations, owning no name to purify and honor and give
away when he is dead. His mother, at work to-day in the Oliver
plantations, can never comprehend why her boy is famous; this gift
of God to him means nothing to her. Nothing to him, either, which
is saddest of all; he is unconscious, wears his crown as an idiot
might. Whose fault is that? Deeper than slavery the evil lies. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
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