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e Chickadee In 1857 Dred Scott was affirmed a slave, not a citizen nor a man but a thing like a stone or a bird by the highest court in the land. He woke and washed his face. He rubbed his eyes with his hands. His daughter Eliza gave him a kiss on the cheek when she heard the news. She gave him a pair of boots and a walking stick cut from the vine of a rose, that old symbol for love. A few things useful to a man. He walked out of the house to work and rubbed his eyes with his hands. The man who wrote the opinion of the court, Justice Robert Tanney, will soon hold a Bible, swearing in Lincoln as the sixteenth president of the United States and then he will rub his eyes with his hands. Soon Death will rise and bloom inside thousands across the land. For now it is quiet. A chickadee sleeps in the gravedigger’s hand.  ...

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