Harling had told me. When he was
sitting, or standing still, he swayed back and forth incessantly, like a
rocking toy. At the piano, he swayed in time to the music, and when he was
not playing, his body kept up this motion, like an empty mill grinding on.
He found the pedals and tried them, ran his yellow hands up and down the
keys a few times, tinkling off scales, then turned to the company.
`She seems all right, gentlemen. Nothing happened to her since the last
time I was here. Mrs. Gardener, she always has this piano tuned up before
I come. Now gentlemen, I expect you've all got grand voices. Seems like
we might have some good old plantation songs tonight.'
The men gathered round him, as he began to play `My Old Kentucky Home.'
They sang one Negro melody after another, while the mulatto sat rocking
himself, his head thrown back, his yellow face lifted, his shrivelled
eyelids never fluttering.
He was born in the Far South, on the d'Arnault plantation, where the spirit
if not the fact of slavery persisted. When he was three weeks old, he had
an illness which left him totally blind. As soon as he was old enough to
sit up alone and toddle about, another affliction, the nervous motion of
his body, became apparent. His mother, a buxom young Negro wench who was
laundress for the d'Arnaults, concluded that her blind baby was `not right'
in his head, and she was ashamed of him.
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