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-jaw,
blubber-lips constantly open, the sightless eyes closed, and the head
thrown far back on the shoulders, lying on the back, in fact, a habit
which he still retains, and which adds to the imbecile character of
the face. Until he was seven years of age, Tom was regarded on the
plantation as an idiot, not unjustly; for at the present time his
judgment and reason rank but as those of a child four years old. He
showed a dog-like affection for some members of the household,--a son
of Mr. Oliver's especially,--and a keen, nervous sensitiveness to the
slightest blame or praise from them,--possessed, too, a low animal
irritability of temper, giving way to inarticulate yelps of passion when
provoked. That is all, so far; we find no other outgrowth of intellect
or soul from the boy: just the same record as that of thousands of
imbecile negro-children. Generations of heathendom and slavery have
dredged the inherited brains and temperaments of such children tolerably
clean of a