Free The Banished Children of Eve by Peter Quinn Page B

impossible to talk to Ned about anything but the Bible and, once he was started on that subject, equally impossible to stop him.
    Foster was astounded when a few years later Mrs. Stowe became the world’s most famous author. Shrewd as well as outspoken, a true daughter of New England, she pushed aside Maria Monk’s
Awful Disclosures of the Hôtel Dieu Nunnery,
with its exposé of popish sexual depravity, as America’s favorite reading. In its place she put her noble Negro, patient, saintly Tom. Foster read the book. Which was further away from the real but impenetrable humanity of these black men and women? His Uncle Ned? Or her Uncle Tom? Still, he admired her. He never spoke to anyone about Negroes, never asserted what observation had confirmed to him: These are men. Mrs. Stowe had. Better yet, she had made a fortune at it. Good luck to her.
    When he finished reading her book, he began writing a song based on it. The tragedy of the Negro. A man sold away from his family. He wrote it in the accounting ledger where he wrote the rough drafts of all his songs:
Oh, good night, good night, good night
    Poor Uncle Tom
    Grieve not for your old Kentucky home
    You’re bound for a better land
    Old Uncle Tom.
    He crossed it out. The new opening came to him whole, in an entire sentence:
The sun shines bright in the old Kentucky home.
He called them darkies instead of niggers. The darkies the white man liked to see,
merry, all happy and bright,
but Mrs. Stowe’s darkies also. The Negro of tragedy taken away from his family and home.
The head must bow
    And the back will have to bend
    Wherever the darkie may go …
    He heard that it wasamong the favorite songs that Confederate military bands liked to play. Rebels marching to a Negro lamenting that
the time has come when the darkies have to part.
Sentiments by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Music makes for strange bedfellows.
    Foster stood by the doorway of the hotel, next to a potted palm. Wished he could remember what he had done with Dunne’s umbrella. He glanced quickly in the direction of where he had been sitting. The clerk was standing in the middle of the lobby, staring. Foster walked outside. The clock atop City Hall said 4:00. The rain had changed into a soundless mizzle.
    On the other side of Broadway, down to his right, was Barnum’s Museum, its façade already ablaze with gaslight, a riot of banners bearing the images of birds and beasts and mermaids. On the balcony, above the door, five men in white gutta-percha coats with red-plumed hats sat on chairs and tuned their instruments. They prepared their siren song for the early-evening crowd. Pay attention, New York.
    Oliver Evans had been a genius of steam and iron, of the mechanical arts. He lived with a lonely vision of the future, with ideas the people couldn’t share,’ at least not in his lifetime. Barnum was a genius of tears and laughter, of the emotions. The shrewdest of the shrewd race of Connecticut Yankee peddlers, he understood the people in their multiple desires. No need to guess. He thought their thoughts as the child in the womb thinks its mother’s thoughts. Barnum waits contentedly in the womb of his public, lets its thoughts and tastes shape him, and then, at the moment of parturition, emerges to give them the very things they knew they wanted but couldn’t articulate.
Hurry, hurry, hurry, step right up, here for your viewing pleasure, the one, the only, the object of your desire!
    Three times Foster had left his name with the museum manager. Once, a brief note.
You may remember me. We met during a trip I made to New York ten years ago. I would like to discuss a business proposition of possible benefit to us both.
    No answerbeyond “Mr. Barnum has your note.”
    The band struck up “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Two years ago, the traffic and pedestrians would have come to a halt. Now they moved on, iron-covered wheels rattling over cobblestones, draymen