Free The Banished Children of Eve by Peter Quinn Page A

husband, Calvin Stowe, was a minister and scholar. He taught at the Lane Theological Seminary. She came from a family of preachers. Her father was Lyman Beecher. Her brothers were preachers back east.
    He expected a shy, proper,quiet woman. Mrs. Stowe surprised him. When he came into the room, she was standing by the window with Mrs. Dodge. Mrs. Stowe was a woman so small that her growth seemed to have been arrested in childhood. She walked over to Stephen without waiting for Mrs. Dodge to make the introductions.
    He bowed slightly at the waist. She barely reached his chest. He stared down into her small, pale face. “Mr. Foster,” she said, “while I find your music enjoyable, I find the lyrics to be offensive and vicious.” He burst out laughing. He couldn’t help himself. The incongruity of it, this diminutive woman in black striding over and, without the smallest amenities, launching into her sermon. His laughter didn’t stop her. “You make the Negro an object of ridicule,” she said. “You confirm the white man in his silly notions of a divinely conferred superiority.” She had a piece of paper in her hand. She read from it:
I jumped aboard the telegraph,
    And trabbled down de ribber,
    De ‘lectric fluid magnified
    And killed five hundred nigger.
    â€œYou should know better, Mr. Foster. A man of your talents should be filling the country with the uplifting music of brotherhood, not such inanities. The Negro is not someone to be laughed at, Mr. Foster. For his suffering, God will exact a price. The laughter will stop. There will be tears instead.”
    Mrs. Dodge interposed herself. She handed them their cups of tea. Foster smiled at Mrs.Stowe. He wasn’t insulted. He liked her direct way, always liked that in people, not having to figure out where somebody stood. The Negro as a figure of tragedy. She was on to something. The sadness of the Negro. The only one he really knew was Olivia. A girl of sadness. Others never saw that part of her, but he had. The way she cried. Such pain. And there was also Uncle Ned, the free Negro who swept out the office. An ancient, stooped man with a great air of tragedy, he died at the beginning of the summer from the cholera. No
more hard work for poor old Ned, He’s gone whar de good niggers go.
    Sometimes, after work as a clerk in the steamboat office in Cincinnati, Stephen would go down to the docks and watch the gangs of Negroes load and unload the boats. They were men. He had never given it much thought before. Never looked at Negroes with any intent of figuring out who they were, no more than he tried to distinguish the individual horses in the work teams that endlessly hauled wagons to and from the docks. Now he watched them. When the work stopped, they stood together in a group, talking and looking over their shoulders at the white men who oversaw them. Their whole way of speaking and gesticulating changed when they were by themselves. There was a litheness to their step, an energy and gracefulness, that they lost when the whites returned. They threw back their heads and laughed. Loud laughter. Rhythmical, playful, high-pitched. Yet there was something sly and mocking in it, conspiratorial. White people were unnerved by it. They were sure it was at their expense, Sambo and Cudjo making sport of their master, aping his walk or mannerisms, returning his contempt.
    â€œCome over here, boys,” the white man would yell, and the Negroes would come. They could be coaxed into singing or commanded to dance or made into the butt of a joke, but they kept the secret of their laughter to themselves, a subversive glare lingering above the broad, innocent smile.
    What did they talk about among themselves? Foster thought about approaching them but knew they would respond to him as they did to all white men. The free Negroes were even more guarded than theslaves. They hurried to end any conversation and get on their way. It had been