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S Blind Tom By the author of “Margret Howth” Only a germ in a withered flower, That the rain will bring out—sometime. OMETIME 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,1 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 [as] 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 From the Atlantic Monthly (November 1862): 580–585. Thomas Greene Wiggins (1849–1908) was a slave purchased by James Bethune of Georgia. An autistic savant with extraordinary musical skills, Thomas’s repertoire included seven thousand pieces, with nearly one hundred of them his own compositions. When Bethune discovered Thomas’s talents, he exhibited him as “Blind Tom” in hundreds of venues and to enormous profit for the Bethune family. Indentured long after Emancipation, Thomas was eventually reunited with his mother, Charity Greene, as the result of a long legal battle. Greene continued exhibiting Thomas’s talents on the concert stage as “the last slave set free by order of the Supreme Court of the United States” until shortly before his death. 1 Common but derogatory term for a black child. 86 Blind Tom 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,2 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 mushroomgrowth ,—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. Mr. Oliver did his duty well to the boy, being an observant and thoroughly kind master. The plantation was large, heartsome, faced the sun, swarmed with little black urchins, with plenty to eat, and nothing to do. All that Tom required, as he fattened out of baby- into boyhood, was room in which to be warm, on the grass-patch, or by the kitchen-fires, to be stupid, flabby, sleepy,—kicked and petted alternately by the other hands. He had a habit of crawling up on the porches and verandas of the mansion and squatting there in the sun, waiting for a kind word or touch from those who went in and out. He seldom failed to receive it. Southerners know nothing of the physical shiver of aversion with which even the Abolitionists of the North touch the negro: so Tom, through his very helplessness, came to be a sort of pet in the family, a playmate, occasionally , of Mr. Oliver’s own infant children. The boy, creeping about day after day in the hot light, was as repugnant an object as the lizards in the neighboring swamp, and promised to be of as little use to his master . He was of the lowest negro type, from which only field-hands can be made,—coal-black, with protruding heels, the ape...

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