Have not many of us, in the weary way of life, felt, in some hours, how far easier it were to die than to live?
The martyr, when faced even by a death of bodily anguish and horror, finds in the very terror of his doom a strong stimulant and tonic. There is a vivid excitement, a thrill and fervor, which may carry through any crisis of suffering that is the birth-hour of eternal glory and rest.
But to live,””to wear on, day after day, of mean, bitter, low, harassing servitude, every nerve dampened and depressed, every power of feeling gradually smothered,””this long and wasting heart-martyrdom, this slow, daily bleeding away of the inward life, drop by drop, hour after hour,””this is the true searching test of what there may be in man or woman.
When Tom stood face to face with his persecutor, and heard his threats, and thought in his very soul that his hour was come, his heart swelled bravely in him, and he thought he could bear torture and fire, bear anything, with the vision of Jesus and heaven but just a step beyond; but, when he was gone, and the present excitement passed off, came back the pain of his bruised and weary limbs,””came back the sense of his utterly degraded, hopeless, forlorn estate; and the day passed wearily enough.
Long before his wounds were healed, Legree insisted that he should be put to the regular field-work; and then came day after day of pain and weariness, aggravated by every kind of injustice and indignity that the ill-will of a mean and malicious mind could devise. Whoever, in our circumstances, has made trial of pain, even with all the alleviations which, for us, usually attend it, must know the irritation that comes with it. Tom no longer wondered at the habitual surliness of his associates; nay, he found the placid, sunny temper, which had been the habitude of his life, broken in on, and sorely strained, by the inroads of the same thing. He had flattered himself on leisure to read his Bible; but there was no such thing as leisure there. In the height of the season, Legree did not hesitate to press all his hands through, Sundays and week-days alike. Why shouldn’t he?””he made more cotton by it, and gained his wager; and if it wore out a few more hands, he could buy better ones. At first, Tom used to read a verse or two of his Bible, by the flicker of the fire, after he had returned from his daily toil; but, after the cruel treatment he received, he used to come home so exhausted, that his head swam and his eyes failed when he tried to read; and he was fain to stretch himself down, with the others, in utter exhaustion.
Is it strange that the religious peace and trust, which had upborne him hitherto, should give way to tossings of soul and despondent darkness? The gloomiest problem of this mysterious life was constantly before his eyes,””souls crushed and ruined, evil triumphant, and God silent. It was weeks and months that Tom wrestled, in his own soul, in darkness and sorrow. He thought of Miss Ophelia’s letter to his Kentucky friends, and would pray earnestly that God would send him deliverance. And then he would watch, day after day, in the vague hope of seeing somebody sent to redeem him; and, when nobody came, he would crush back to his soul bitter thoughts,””that it was vain to serve God, that God had forgotten him. He sometimes saw Cassy; and sometimes, when summoned to the house, caught a glimpse of the dejected form of Emmeline, but held very little communion with either; in fact, there was no time for him to commune with anybody.
–Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which kept coming to mind as I thought on the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s death in Memphis this weekend
When I started to read Kendall’s excerpt, I thought back to a two-year tour I did in the early 1970s and the flat I had just off Onkel-Tom-Strasse in the Onkel-Tom Quarter of the US Sector of divided and occupied Berlin. The book was as enduringly popular in Germany as in the States. Most Berliners passionately believed Tom had been a real person and many tried to reconcile the harshness of his life with the daily reality of seeing black US Army officers being saluted by white enlisted and vv. I remember particularly a Captain Worthington and a Sergeant Warren. Both spoke fluent German although Warren had a drawl thick enough to obscure much of what he said. On their own time, they would visit neighborhood centers and churches to speak of Onkel-Tom and their own perspectives as Christians and as the great-grandson of a slave and the grandson of a slave-owner respectively. This was less than 6 years after the murder of Dr. King. The men were both professional soldiers and spoke candidly of remaining issues between the races within the army. Both the soldiers and their audiences benefited.
Bob
My assumptions of just what effect “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” had on the society of the 1850’s was greatly altered by actually reading the book. It was not at all as described by my teachers.
Uncle Tom was human. Uncle Tom was a christian. I, as a white guy, can not separate his humanity from mine. The effect had great power on me.
Don