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LAURIE BLOCK: I was forewarned. Pursuing questions about charity in America, would take me, a good Jewish girl, to church. But to find my way there, I had to go to the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts, one of the country's most respected libraries, a secular place, a haven for the paper ephemera of our national life as it was lived before the 20th century. AMBIENT SOUND: street noise, walking, opening door AMERICAN ANTIQUARIAN SOCIETY: LIVE CHECK IN/SIGN IN ambient sound BLOCK: Joanne Chaison helped me with my library search. SOUND OF ON-LINE CATALOGUE, AND CARD CATALOGUE BLOCK: I don't know is disability even a term we can use... JOANNE CHAISON: It probably isn't . . . BLOCK: Try Handicapped. CHAISON: That's a little better. We have a hundred and fifty five records. BLOCK:The old vernacular lies in the historical record like the stones of an archaeological dig. As we scrolled through, the hard scrabble language called attention to itself. CHAISON: Let's look at a couple of these in children's literature... The title of this particular book is called Witless Willie, the Idiot Boy. BLOCK: This was a surprise. I was looking for what ordinary people in the 19th century thought about disability. But I didn't anticipate finding this, children's literature published by the Christian tract societies. And lots of it too. We found more than 200 tales of moral instruction. READER: The Deformed Boy, the Happy Mute, The Little HunchBack, Poor Matt, The Clouded Intellect, The Patient Cripple, Crazy Mary, Blind Nelly, Mary Gay, The Lame Boy, The Deaf Boy's Triumph, Patience and her Friend, Susy's Sacrifice, Use What You Have. BLOCK: No pussy footing or political correctness here. These books were written between 1820 and the civil war. But what had we dug up? AMBIENT SOUND UNDER: FOOTSTEPS, THROUGH DOOR, UP STAIRS... BLOCK: Joanne led me into the stacks. CHAISON: Here we are in the children's literature department and this is Laura Wasowicz's office BLOCK: Laura became my guide. No daylight falls into her work place, the ultra-violet rays would harm these antique volumes. LAURA WASOWICZ: I have looked at over ten thousand of these children's books from the nineteenth century. There are plots that involve children losing their parents to sickness, children watching their brother or sister die, of some horrid illness like scrofula. Who dies of scrofula, these days? I am still sometimes just amazed at the straight forward detail in their descriptions of the infirmity, of the pain. BLOCK: The books have gold leaf titles and fit neatly into an eight year old's hand. Inside, you can sometimes find a child's name or a special bookplate--an award for Sunday School attendance. This one Jessie Allen, the True Child, was given as a prize in the spring of 1858. READING: " A bustle in the street called her attention. A neighbor put in saying: It's an Infirmary chair. The very sight of which makes one feel sad, as it recalls so many painful images of sickness, and want Poor Jessy's heart sunk when she heard it was come. BLOCK:The infirmary chair is an ambulance and Jessy is a 12 year old girl whose infected leg is about to be amputated without anesthesia. Faith in God is the only comfort. I tried to imagine my ten year old girls reaction to the story. READING: "The doctor told Jessy he would have to amputate. And when Jessy heard his last step, all her power to act firmly seemed to go with him, and she sunk down in her bed, and wept bitterly. Every painful thing came before her -- the dreadful operation -- the lameness for life. All the thoughts of happier days, all must be given up forever! At last a voice seemed to whisper in Jessy's heart, 'Is this the way you suffer the will of your Lord? BLOCK:Doctors play almost no part in these stories. A much more important character is the visitor -- the giver of help, a sort of prototype of the social worker, usually a Christian woman who volunteers her time to bring cheer and the Gospel to the unfortunate. Jessy's mentor is her Sunday School teacher. READING: "Yes, mistress the Lord has wonderfully reconciled me to his will in this trial. Jessy could scarcely say this for weeping, and the mistress could not answer . . ." BLOCK: In a world without television, movies, and radio, these vividly illustrated little books provided an uplifting moral entertainment. Thousands of them were published, and they taught an entire generation -- the able and the disaabled -- how to think about the meaning of disability. Ambient activity rises up to verbal level at the AAS. BLOCK: When I first began reading these stories under the big dome of the Antiquarian Society's library, I would call home at night and say I was an ethnographer visiting a forgotten, deeply Protestant land. Sometimes I found them unbearable in their inevitability -- I wanted to protect the children, to warn them. Look out for the wagon wheels, the thin ice, be careful of the stove. But they are never spared. Even more difficult for me was the submissiveness required of the children -- the constant necessity to willingly accept very difficult circumstances, appalling pain, and always, even if it was after a struggle, with a relentless cheerfulness that frightened me. READING: "Robert's bedroom is very small, low. The air is heavy. Robert had changed so much since Willie had seen him, that he felt as if he should not have known him if he had met him elsewhere it was not until he smiled that Willie could see anything of Robert there. Robert spoke cheerfully, "I hoped some day I might be stronger, not always a poor cripple; but God knows best. I am very happy, Willie." " O Roby...I am so sorry for you, and it isn't fair a bit. Here we great, strong boys that never had a hard knock in our lives, and you get them all. I don't know what it means Robert, but I am very sorry." "Ah " said Robert, smiling cheerfully, "I know what it means. God wants you 'great strong boys' to work for him; he has a great deal for you to do, and he only wants a poor lame boy like me to suffer for him." BLOCK: Once the child humbly accepts his suffering, he or she becomes the worthy recipient--of God's grace, and of charity. There is an etiquette that prescribes this interchange. Those who are supposedly in need of help don't demand it, but their presence, and their humility, inspires people to give, even if it is only an encouraging smile. READER: "An affliction opens, as God meant it should, the hearts and hands of every one near." BLOCK: The giving of charity was [more than an obligation, it was] thought to be an expression of faith, and this was a means to salvation. This was a lesson taught very young. WASOWICZ: A little boy, might see a child in rags in the street, and the mother says, "Well, look, little Johnnie. I'll give you two cents to buy whatever candy you want. But first let's just walk down this street, because you see, not everybody has a nice home as you have." Silence. Kids walk past, and see the beggars. And it's like inner conversion. They see the child in need, and they realize that to walk past and do nothing, not only would it be bad, it would be downright sinful. BLOCK: Many of these tales must be about real people. The descriptions of how a child with palsy learns to eat, how a blind child learns to walk around the house, are too [very] carefully observed to be made up. It was eery to me how familiar the stories sentiments seemed. Many times I 've been told how a child with a disability is a blessing to a family, how such troubles only come to those who can cope. As if God is actively making these choices! The impulses and attitudes in these Protestant tales are still at work. Its as though people are following an old, old script--even when its direct theological imperatives are no longer universal. Music BLOCK: Do you know the book about John Ellard? WASOWICZ: Oh, sure, the news boy. John Ellard was not an angelic child. he would complain, he could really be a pain! BLOCK: John Ellard was the only child in the nearly 200 tales I read who resisted the role of the blessed sufferer. He resolutely rejected the idea that being a hunchback and a cripple was a gift from God, that his disability served a higher, nobler purpose. Ellard wasn't bitter or cynical. He had a great sense of humor. But he didn't submit. On Sunday's he found it difficult to sit still in church. And when the minister once remarked, that God has never done an unkind act, that everything He made was good. Ellard replied, God makes bad things too. Why he made me a cripple. In the end, he gets very sick, and on his deathbed, he willingly yields his soul to God. WASOWICZ: Eventually he died, in Jesus. So it did have a happy ending, according to this genre, but that's what'a so fascinating about this literature, you see this gradual infusion, of children's individuality. I remember John Ellard, you remember John Ellard, as a person really. BLOCK: I was glad for his resistance, his pluck, his frank direct honesty. After all, what if a child like my own daughter doesn't want to play the role of Tiny Tim, what if after a while, it simply isn't useful to be the symbol of a theological puzzle. What if you simply want to be yourself, and the world asks you to be your disability. MUSIC : Period piano parlor pieces: Little Eva's Death Scene Ambient sound of kids and twilight. BLOCK: I live in a picture postcard New England neighborhood. The houses are 100 years old and more. My lawn is the old Baptist Church yard. It's easy to imagine the 1850s. A visitor coming to help bathe a boy like Roby, an invalid, who'd been thrown from a horse. A deaf child who could use sign language and read the Bible after going to the special school for the deaf in Hartford, the tuition paid by the elders of the church. There are light and dark corners in the historical past. But the voices of people with disabilities and what they think about their experience is very hard to find. These children's books I had read were nearly always written by the able. |
