UNCLE TOM’S CABIN
(And his cubiculum)
A review as I see it.
I once read that truth “is stranger than fiction,” but after reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin, I concluded that ‘fiction is stranger than the truth.’ I also peruse Robert Fielding's History of Tom Jones, a book I will recommend to all students of jurisprudence and those who want to see England at closed quarters in the 19th century besides the works of William Thackeray as the Vanity Fair to see the decadence that was London. They could top them up with the works of Charles Dickens many of you are sadly using his volumes now as door weights or decorations of their shelves in the coffee or powder rooms. The ease at which we can watch films on our modern gadgets and youths being distracted by the so-called video games have made many prospective readers of English literature become pictorial learned. In consequence, many cannot do without artificial intelligence, the robots. The long-run effects of all these in the future of man has to be studied now for us to ascertain that we are leading our children in the right direction and not to wait on others to do things for themselves as was the case of slavery in the past, the subject matter of Uncle Tom. A priori, we do not believe they could stand and argue with scholars of the past based on the way they are being inculcated in their disciplines. They are not as thorough as collegiate fellows from Oxford, Cambridge, and Yale of the past. It is left for sociologists or psychologists to see the repercussions in the intellectual society of the world today or that of the future.
My commentary on this work may not necessarily convince you to sympathize with me. Everyone is entitled to his or her opinion often clouded by one's backgrounds or inclinations. Whatever one’s opinions, they must convince one’s audience without any shred of the doubt if one wants to win them over. Harriet Beecher Stowe is the authoress of the renounced Uncle Tom’s Cabin which all youths in America should be reading instead of putting thousands of hours playing some video games that prostitute their minds. I got the authoress' crystal clear message that provoked my rendition. In a way, mine is a review of a review that is profusely illustrated. The rationale for my style is obvious. It is my way of not leaving the reader in doubts as facts are there for verification. Many are still naive in the 21st century when it concerns race, the color of man and environmental determinism. This is underscored in THE American society where people are ever class conscious and deeply worried as for how they are viewed by their society or others. This bothers some people so much to the extent that even when they attend the same church or enter on the same train they may prefer to stand up than to sit near others they assume may not be comfortable with them. The novel denounces the maltreatment of others for the way they look or behave with particular reference to peoples of African origin.
Human pigmentation, or religious beliefs or racial issues that had been the contention of past and present sufferings cannot be debated in the 21st century casually. It is something level-headed men want to leave behind them and my dwelling upon them is not to unleash mayhem, exhume the ugly past but to mend fences and underline the fact that we are all one. I am aware of the fact that no normal person will be racist but I cannot deny the fact that it racism permeates all walk of this society. You see it when men do not vote for a candidate with good programs to enrich the society simply because he or she is not of their color. We see it when people rather die than to be attended to by people of other races. It exhumes the apartheid of South Africa and America of the Confederation we are concerned with in this document that will keep our past for eternity. Those who know environmental determinism should be aware of the fact that all were and are one striving towards accomplishing one goal, decent coexistence and looking forward to Elysium for those who believe in God.
Enslaving someone was taking away his or her freedom. Some of those who engaged in these inhuman activity expected mercy from God as they honestly believed that they were doing the work of God. Were they? A governor in one of the states in Africa died. In his sick bed, he confessed that he had a good life because of the draconian ways he ruled. He tortured, flogged, killed but he confessed that he had to do all those to satisfy his paymaster, an autocratic leader. Do we have to embezzle to sustain our epicurean lifestyles so that when we would be dying we could confess? How would we atone for those who had suffered in our hands? What would we tell God when we say adieu to this earth? Then the authoress of this wonderful classical work, Harriet Beecher Stowe is wondering how that could be possible. I cannot help to see how I could not be in terms with this authoress after perusing this ambassadorial cause of liberty. Perhaps because I am sensitive, and humane not necessarily because I am African but because I am realistic, scientific and seek no favor from anyone for commenting the way I have done. From my perspective, there is only one person on earth and his color, where he grows up or his intellect does not make him different from his neighbor to the extent of him being dehumanized or enslaved. All are the same and composed of the same atoms be they well-shaped, amorphous or assuming any dazzling color of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Another book I once read when I was a scholar in the 90s in London was Albert Mukong’s Prisoner without a Crime. I did not understand why some people would go miles just to inflict punishment on our already hellish earth that is supposed to be made into a kingdom on earth. I suppose these are sadists who gratified when they see their kinds in misery. We are not going to forget Idi Amin Dada, the murderer of Uganda, Adolf Hitler with his pogrom of the Jews, gays, lesbians, blacks, and many others. We question why on earth these idiosyncrasies come up and what are in the minds of those who perpetuate them, not only for one year but for years, not only in the past but hitherto and will still be in the future. I call this the cyclical paradigm of man that never ends as he often does not learn from it. The American civil war, the second world war, the wars in the Middle East that are spiraling out of all proportion and the jihad skirmishes in Africa are essentially triggered by religious beliefs or philosophies and color of man. Therefore, it is not appropriate that man be inculcated with the true doctrine that there are no differences in man be he of any color or belief in any doctrine or religion? That is the truth that man for selfish reasons had and still has difficulties accepting.
A young priest told me recently that he was disturbed beyond words after reading Albert Mukong’s slice of his autobiography. Mukong was imprisoned by an autocratic regime in Cameroon for his human rights' records and fighting for justice of all and sundry. He was released after passing through hell in various Cameroon prisons to write his story, A Prisoner Without a Crime.
I will tell you that I could not believe what I was reading, seeing, hearing and the anguish that I felt while reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin that had stood the test of time. I could not help to visit it more than once. Twice to ascertain that what I had read was written by a living person who actually witnessed some of what were vividly painted in the novel without exaggeration or seeking for favors. If I were a slave owner or one who imprisoned those fighting for economic, human and political rights, I would have extricated all prisoners that fell into those categories. If not abolish all forms of human tortures and seek ways to compensate those who had been unjustly maltreated by wicked men for no fault of theirs. Then these are wishful thoughts I am grateful for this medium for giving me the platform to immortalize.
When we talk of callous men, some of them do not see their faults. When Albert Mukong had called Solomon Tandem Muna a ‘traitor’ he doubted it. He had sold the British Southern Cameroons [now variously known as UNO Cameroon or Ambazonia] as slaves for his benefits and did not see that as being off beam. The British Southern Cameroons, the southern section of British Cameroons sandwiched between Nigeria Federation, Equatorial Guinea Republic and the Cameroon Republic in West Africa was to languish and the only way out of the melee was to offer them at the altar of injustice and place their faith and hope in God for his mercy to be shown as He did that to enslaved African Americans and others.
My sketchy analysis of this masterpiece is not extraordinary but I have tried to be in terms with Mrs. Stowe. I have uplifted some of her strident passages that definitely rang the nervous cords of many readers of her epoch that I believe will do so for many of us today. I have picked them at random but they all have one thing in common, namely, appealing to the readers that trafficking in men and their enslavement were morally wrong irrespective of citation of the Holy Bible to substantiate what the slave dealers were doing or whatever moral underpinnings. It is not only the Bible that is used for callous deeds, the Koran is used today by Islamic fundamentalists to destroy those who are not like them in their wake. To some followers of the later book or philosophy, a Muslim believer can destroy a nonbeliever and this is acceptable. This is gross and will never be accepted in any decent and civilized society. It is not only that, at the time of writing, women are still sold in many parts of the world. Surprisingly many do not object to it even then most of them are women's children. Many can scream and demonstrate in droves to allow Muslims to enter Christian countries but would not do so for very Muslims to liberate their women folks. It is amazing that what we now dread, is still taking place in some countries and nation states in our blue world hitherto.
I know that my heaven is not on earth and that if I am preparing for that to come, I dare not block it by unacceptable deeds or statements that lead to torture or making lives of many on earth a living hell. Stowe appeals to those defaulters who had blocked their humane reasoning that at the end of the day the slaves and the free men on earth will die to face one judge in Heaven, Our Lord as follows: “O ye who take freedom from man, with what word shall ye answer it to God?’ (p.384). Then, if some people believe that they are not different from animals or trees and that their lives end the moment they breathe their last. Does it really end?
Whatever the case, as the authoress predicted, God will speak to the fathers of the Caucasoid, Mongoloids and the Negroids who after assuming protective coloration that distinguish them from one another yet they are all one stemming from one parentage. Some behave as if they have no connection whatsoever and that is myopic. This is the reason Stowe advances:
“If the poor forgotten slave believes that Jesus hath appeared and spoken to him, who shall contradict him? Did He not say that His mission in all ages was to bind up the broken-hearted, and set at liberty them that are bruised?”(p.388).
Should anyone doubt it when among the whites, it was known that Africans were perhaps the only race that had received the words of God with such eager docility? This has been so for Africans had had that innate inclination to accept without questioning and that was a fertile ground for the implantation of Christianity and other religions or foreign beliefs. When Haiti was rebelling against slavery, African slaves in the southern USA would not irrespective of the fact that their ratio to the whites was relatively higher. Those Africans had been taught by the only book they were allowed to read or possess, the Holy Bible that it was not allowed by God to retaliate on those who inflicted punishment on you. Darwin's Sacred Cause (2010) by Desmond, A. et al. another book that castigates Charles Darwin and others who fanned slavery with their hierarchical classification of man in the Origin of Species explicates this phenomenon.
When I perused the above citation (p. 388), I vividly recapitulated the report of Rev. John Emonts, SCJ, his travelogue, To the Grassfields and Highlands of Inner Cameroons on the Nszo (Ngonsonia) and other peoples of the Grassfields, or the Cameroon at large. He had seen an innate tendency in those folks to be religious and commented that it had provided a very fertile ground for the evangelization, implantation of the true Church Jesus Christ established on earth.
This writer had not forgotten to stress the innocence and flawlessness of African people a fact highlighted by the introduction to the first edition of his book this is what was written of Africans:
"…a race hitherto ignored by the associations of polite and refined society; an exotic race, whose ancestors , born beneath a tropic sun, brought with them, and perpetuated to their descendant, a character so essentially unlike the hard and dominant Anglo-Saxon race, as for many years to have won from it only misunderstanding and contempt" (p. xi).
Let us look at it from a different angle. Where can we find in the history of the man of Africa having invaded other parts of the world and imposed his philosophies for his selfish wants? Where had he been to Europe to enslave his cousins who left Africa a long time ago? Where can it be pointed out in the history of Asia where and when he came to defeat and enslave Asians on in their homes? The African had been taken by force from his land to work for others in Europe, the Middle East, within Africa and to the Americas where he worked without pay for centuries. He had been enslaved in his land of his birth in Africa in what we have called colonialism below. His land was fragmented for the benefit of his cousins who invaded his land for their benefits and not for his. He had never thought of retaliation when he had his freedom but had raised his hand of amity to those who enslaved him abroad and in his land. Who is humane, the slavers or the slaves or the descendants of slaves? [You will see that the colonialists militarized Africa as some still sadly do hitherto and during both World Wars. Africans had to fight on their side. If Africans thought of what they had gone through in the hands of Europeans, Turks, and Arabs, they would not have stepped out of their continent to fight for the Europeans. Yet they fought to stamp out injustice and make a better world. We hope Europeans do not forget them and keep on proving to them that the person with superior firepower can enslave the other and exploit him].
The authoress of this well-written work as long ago as in the early 1840s had started appreciating the contributions that Africans had made to the rest of mankind who were all descendants of Africans in the first place as in this excerpts cited below. It will be recalled that in order for Caucasian and Arab slavers to harden their feelings towards Africans, they painted all sorts of bogus pictures about Africans essentially to belittle and animalize them in the face of other human beings on earth. Also to Arabs and Europeans slavers, they were pagans and subhumans.
“ In this general movement, unhappy African, at last, is remembered; Africa, who began the race of civilization and human progress in the dim, gray dawn of early time, but who for centuries, had lain bound and bleeding at the foot of civilized and Christianized humanity imploring compassion in vain. …But the heart of the dominant race, who have been her conquerors her had masters, has at length been turned towards her in mercy; and it has been seen how far nobler it is in nations to protect the feeble than to oppress them. Thanks be to God, the world has, at last, outlived the slave-trade!” (p. xi).
This was one introductory remark in the edition I perused I want to reiterate for those who want to share with those who have not read this book and will not for their reason:
“It has been stated that books like the present are not the legitimate means to down slavery. We might ask them very fairly, what are? Are we to wait till slaveholders propose the abolition of slaves? Or till a pro-slavery legislature, which has just passed the Fugitive Slave Bill, and ruled American by slaveholders for above sixty years, voluntarily declare the slave free? How, but by enlightening and influencing public opinion, guided by religious sentiment drawn from the Word of God, along settled the question in England, and that, too, will affect it in America if she will listen; and, if not, it is by no means difficult to divine what must be the sad result. Slavery is an unmixed, unmitigated evil in any civilized country. Under the light of the Gospel it deprives man, not only guiltless but un-accused of crime, of every civil and religious right; denies him legal compensation for any wrong, however, grievous; annihilates conjugal and parental relations; consigns him at pleasure to heathenism; withholds from him the Bible and education; and reduces him to the condition of brutes. (p.3).
James Sherman while lauding the authoress, Harriet Beecher Stowe remarked that there were some persons who purported to be men of God who openly kept slaves and treated them inhumanly as in this excerpt. But before I underscore this I would like to add that there are others as burlesque Freemasons who given the opportunity will do away with men of dark-skinned complexions for reasons they cannot scientifically substantiate other than share racism and bigotry and a denial of the existence of our Master and Maker Jesus Christ. How many times do we get a report of racism each day in the world? How many times do we deny people jobs, accommodation, land, refuse to mingle or marriage them because of the color of their skin today? They know that it is wrong yet they do it:
“It must be remembered that, besides these ministers and church members, who hold slaves and deal with them as property –sell children from their parents and divide husbands and wives –lacerate their flesh and ruin their souls – a large number, if not a majority, of the ministers of religion in America, patronized the system of slavery, though they hold no slaves themselves. Some indeed profess in theory to abominate slavery, but they stand aloof from all efforts to suppress it. You will never hear a petition presented in public to either God or man from their lips for the emancipation of the slave. Dr. Gardener Spring, an eminent Presbyterian clergyman of New York, well known in this country by his religious publications, has declared that “if by one prayer he could liberate every slave in the world, he would not offer it.” The Rev. Dr. Parker, of Philadelphia, affirms, in a recent thanksgiving sermon that “there are not evils in slavery but such as are inseparable from any other relation in civil and social life.”
On being treated as property this is what Mrs. Stowe had to say:“Human property is high in the market; and is therefore well fed, well cleaned, tended and looked after, that it may come to sale sleek, and strong, and shining. A slave warehouse in New Orleans is a house externally not much unlike many other, kept with neatness; and where every day you may see arranged, under a sort of shed along the outside, rows of men and women, who stand there as a sign of the property sold within.Then you shall be courteously entreated to call and examine, and shall find an abundance of husbands and wives, brothers sister, father, mother, and young children, to be ‘sold separately or in lots, to suit the convenience of the purchaser;’ and that soul immortal, once bought with blood and anguished by the Son of God, when the earth shook, and the rocks rent and the graves were opened, can be sold, leased, mortgaged, exchanged for groceries or dry good, to suit the phases of trade or the fancy of the purchaser.” (p. pp. 325-326).
In spite threats and stoic support for the perpetual enslavement of Africans, Mrs. Stowe had that dazzling audacity to speak out from the rostrum God had given her and that is Uncle Tom’s Cabin. That treatise still commands respect and melts down hearts of hardened and milky men over injustice. If they could afford to set aside their daily chores, imbibing intoxicants, beers, and wines and peruse it between the lines as I have done for the first time they could be positively changed to look at mankind as one. On this, James Sherman added:
“And I cannot but hope that Mrs. Stowe, whose rare and sanctified talent command the eye and ear of the multitude, will turn her attention to the ecclesiastical state of the question, and show to American ministers their sin and shame. It would confer a real blessing on them; for slavery is blessing on them; for slavery is the bane of all the churches; it sits like an incubus on their prosperous development; it prevents divine influence from flowing among them, and is a barrier to the progress of those revivals for which so many of their churches have been eminent. Get the ministers to act and speak alright, and you gain the churches; get the churches to do their duty, and you move the legislature; for no enlightened legislature can long resist a deep religious sense of right to our fellow-men, when calmly, but firmly expressed – even by a minority.” (p. 5.)
The prefectural writer, Sherman appeals to religious men and those in political authorities to ‘break every yoke, and let the oppressed go free.’
He ended with a soul moving poem that I will refer you to once more for those of us who have never had the opportunity to read this book:
Men of thought! Be up and stirring,
Night and day;
Sow the see – with draw the curtain,
Clear the way!
Men of action aid and cheer them,
As ye may!
There’s a fount about to steam,
There’s a light about to beam,
There‘s a warmth about to glow,
There’s a flower about to blow;
There’s a midnight blackness changing’
Into gray:
Men of thought, and men of action,
Clear the way!
Once the welcome light had broken
Who shall say
What the unimagined glories
Of the day?
What the evil that shall perish
In its ray?
Aid the dawning, tongue, and pen;
Aid it, hopes of honest men;
Aid it, paper –aid it, type—
Aid it, for the hour, is ripe,
And our earnest and men of action
Into play,
Men of thought, and men of action,
Clear the way!
James Sherman
I am a novice in fiction writing, let me call it doodling as I am still waiting for you the readers, my critics. The truth dear readers is that there is no pure fiction. Most of what we read is the authors’ experiences that he has distorted for fear of prosecution; actors in extant could prosecute them in the court of law. The author of The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins who was a contemporary of Mrs. Harriet Beecher admitted in his prefectural statement that he had to check with his lawyer and friends so those characters that were still living could not take him to court. We shall be coming across maltreatment of African American slaves as in this forthcoming citation I will want to share with you. On the first instant, the protagonist, Uncle Tom is imploring his master not to whip the horse, instead, the frustrated slave owner turned round to whip but him. It is because the owner sees a black man and a horse as same beings. It is true that biologically they are the same. The veracity is that a man has got a soul which an animal has not:“I begged him again and then he turned on me and began striking me. I held his hand, and then he screamed, and kicked, and ran to his father, and told him that I was fighting him. He came in rage and said he's taught me who was my master, and he tied me to a tree, and cut switches for the young master, and told him that he might whip me till he was tired, and he did do it. If I don’t make him remember it sometime!” (p.24)
This was not an isolated incident. From other snatches of conversations, we deduced that whipping of the slaves was common practice. Was that not the same attitude the Europeans, Belgians had when they were ruling the Congolese as their properties? [Those of you who are interested may read E. D. Morel's The Black Man's Burden(1920)]:
“La, there isn't any such thing as truth in that limb,” said Rosa, looking indignantly at Topsy. “If I was Mas’r St. Clare, I’d whip her till the blood run, I would! I’d let her catch it!” (p.248)
Here again is another emphasis on whipping:“Or neither,” said St. Clare. “ The horrid cruelties and outrages that once and a while find their way into the papers … such cases as Prue’s for example – what do they come from? In many cases, it is a gradual hardening process on both sides – the owner growing more and more cruel, as the servants more and more callous. Whipping and abuse are like laudanum; you have to double the dose as the sensibilities decline. I saw this very early when I became an owner, and I resolved never to begin because I did not know when I should stop; and I resolved, at least, to protect my own moral nature. The consequence is that my servants act like spoiled children, but I think that better than for us both to be brutalized together. You have talked a great deal about our responsibilities in education, cousin. I really want you to try with one child, who is a specimen of thousands among us.” (p. 250).
Whipping is the pastime here. The authoress is not kidding as her work is historical:“O Miss Feely, “she said, falling on her knees, and catching the skirt of her dress, “do do go to Miss Marie for me! Do ple d for me! She’s goin’ to send me out to be whipped – look there!” And she handed to Miss Ophelia a paper.. It was an order, written in Marie’s delicate Italian hand, to the master of a whipping establishment, to give the bearer fifteen lashes.“What have you been doing?” said Miss Ophelia.“You know, Miss Feely, I've got such a bad temper; it’s very bad of me. I was trying on Miss Marie’s dress, and she slapped my face; and I spoke out before I thought, and was saucy; and she said that she’d bring me down, and have me know, once for all that I wasn't gong to be so topping as I had been; and she wrote this, and says I shall carry it. I’d rather she’d kill me, right out.”(p.320)
It was customary to send the so-called defaulters to what was known as whipping-houses where there were specialist floggers. Can you imagine that today? Once upon a time this actually existed. You will remember that in the colonial society flogging mentioned above was the commonest form of punishment. It was one way the colons, colonialists employed to enforce their authority on the autochthones. You do not have to go far when you read uncensored colonial reports. It was common in the Belgian Congo, French West, and Equatorial Africa and in early British possessions in Africa for Africans to be summarily flogged even on minor faults. It lingered on where there were Caucasian settlers as in South Africa, Rhodesia was now known as Zimbabwe; rightly it should have been called Monomotapa, Kenya, Mozambique, Angola, Sao Tome and Principe and German S. W. Africa, now known as Namibia. The case of King Leopold's Congo was so macabre. If natives did not supply the required rubber, they were flogged. If they ran away from their villages, soldiers were set on them. Those soldiers were asked to bring along trophies as their proof of having done their work. They cut hands or maleness of men, genitalia of women or heads to bring them along as proofs of having executed their tasks. There were a people who had been free and the invaders came, divided their lands, denied them of their resources and they had to pay to harvest what nature had given to them freely to the invaders. If they did not comply, they were imprisoned. That was slavery called colonialism we shall not dwell into.
You will think that slaves were allowed to be free even when they were subservient:“The slave-dealer collects his gang in Virginia or Kentucky, and drives them to some convenient, healthy place – often a watering place – to be fattened. Ere they are fed full daily; and, because some are inclined to pine, a fiddle is kept commonly going among them, and they are made to dance daily; and he who refuses to be merry- in whose thoughts of wife, or child, or home, are too strong for him to be gay – is marked as sullen and dangerous, and subjected to all the evils which the ill-will of an utterly irresponsible and hardened man can inflict upon him. Briskness, alertness, and cheerfulness of appearance, especially before observers, are constantly enforced upon them, both by the hope of thereby getting a good master, and the fear of all that the driver may bring upon then if they prove unsalable.” (p.327)
I will cite another case where a jealous master killed a dog belonging to a slave. Reading my book Who is African American? Crossing Racial Barriers (2009) you will come across guidelines that were actually published on how to term slaves. They were equated to wild horses and had to be trained to be human just as men would train wild horses they have caught in some wilderness. Slave properties were sometimes confiscated from them or in case of pets treated as if they were nothing of value to the slaves as once more elucidated in this except: "Well the other day I was just feeding him with old scraps I picked up by the kitchen-door, and Mas’r came along, and said I was feeding him up; at his expense, and that he couldn’t afford to have every nigger keeping his dog, and ordered me to tie a stone to his neck, and throw him in the pond.” (p.24)
For emphasis, we will look at the way Africans were equated to animals. It did not end up in that. Some slavers considered Africans as some forms of animals that were immune and hence had to treat them as such. Slave owners had the impression that African Americans were animals and it did not bother them if they were sold or bandied as they liked. On this one of the characters had this to say:
“My father’s dividing line was that of color. Among his equals, never was a man more just and generous; but he considered the negro, through all possible gradations of color, as an intermediate link between man and animals, and graded all his ideas of justice or generosity on this hypothesis. I suppose, to be sure, if anybody had asked him, pump and fair, whether they had human immortal souls, he might have hemmed and hawed, and said ‘Yes.’” (p. 228) To them, slaves had no feelings as you will read from another rendering:
“No tear dropped over that pillow. In such traits as these, the heart has not tears to give; it drops only blood, bleeding itself away in silence. She took a piece of paper and a pen”
The word Negro was sometimes substituted by the word Monkey in lower cases as in this instance: “The gal’s no mater of mine – she’s Shelby’s; it’s only the by. I was a fool for buying the monkey!” p. 73.
This term is employed on page 282 by St. Clare one of the characters: “Come here, ops, you monkey!” said St. Clare, calling the child up to him.
On some aspects of the tribulations of the Negroes in the hands of their white owners, these properties were not thought of to have feelings not to talk of feeling pains:“In order to appreciate the sufferings of the Negroes sold south, it must be remembered that all the instructive affections of that race are peculiarly strong. Their local attachments are very abiding. They are not naturally daring and enterprising, but home-loving and affectionate. Add to this all the terrors with which ignorance invests the unknown, and add to this, again, that selling to the south is set before the negro from childhood as the last severity o f punishment. The threat that terrifies more than whipping or torture of any kind is the threat of being sent down the river. We have ourselves heard this feeling expressed by them, and seen the unaffected horror with which they will sit in their gossiping hours, and tell frightful stories of that ‘down river,’ which to them is
‘That undiscovered country, from whose borne
No traveler returns.’A missionary among the fugitives in Canada told us that many of the fugitives confessed themselves to have escaped from comparatively kind masters and that they were induced to have the perils of escape, in almost every case, by the desperate horror with which they regarded being sold south – a doom which was hanging either over themselves or their husbands, their wives, or children. This serves the Africans naturally patient, timid, and un-enterprising, with heroic courage, and leads him to suffer hunger, cold, pain, the perils of the wilderness, and the more dread penalties of re-capture.” (P. 101).
We are not going to give a catalog of what slaves went through. They were branded with the names of their original owners or physically tortured:“Well, the dogs bayed and howled, and we rode and scampered, and finally we started him. He ran and sounded like a buck, and kept us well in the rear for some time, but at last, he got caught in an impenetrable thicket of cane: then he turned to by and I tell you he fought the dogs right gallantly. He dashed them to right and left, and actually killed three of them with only his naked fists when a shot from a gun brought him down, and he fell, wounded and bleeding almost at my feet. The poor fellow looked up at me with manhood and despair both in his eye. I kept back the dogs and the party, as they came pressing up and claimed him as my prisoner. It was all I could do to keep them from shooting him in the flush of success but I persisted in my bargain, and Alfred sold him to me. Well, I took him in hand, and in one fortnight I had him tamed down as a submissive and tractable as heart could desire (p. 237).
‘Ran away from the subscriber, my mulatto boy, George. Said George six feet in height, a very light mulatto, brown curly hair; is very intelligent, speaks handsomely, can read and write; will probably try to pass for a white man; is deeply scarred on his back and shoulders; has been branded in his right hand with the letter H. (p. 111)
Slaves were not good for nothing animals as their owners often falsely claimed. One of the slaves is said to have invented the machine for the cleaning of hemp and he was praised as a valuable affair; and that it had gone into use in several factories. (p.112)
Slaves were put for sale with animals, horses as in this case:“I saw my mother put up at sheriff’s sale, with her seven children. They were sold before her eyes, one by one all to different masters; and I was the youngest. She came and kneeled before old mas’r, and begged him to go buy her with me, that she might have at least one child with her; and he kicked her away with his heavy boot. I saw him do it; and that last that I heard was her moans and screams, when I was tired to his horse’s neck, to be carried off to his place.”
What was the difference here with Africans under apartheid? They would be separated from their families and beloved ones for months and even years. It was as if they had no feeling. Their mealy-meal diet was so poor and protein was hard to come by. Slaves in some estates could have something to eat provided…then there were still problems as in this case: On another instance, a slave is reporting of eating bones that were meant for the dog. This was further to humiliate slaves and to enforce their proper place in the Caucasian-dominated world. Remember too that when colonialism was at its height in Africans, colons had to treat autochthones like subhuman beings. You need to read Richard Joseph’s 1977, Radical Nationalism in Cameroun: Social Origin of U.P.C. Rebellion to appreciate what I am talking about. We are not going to exhume apartheid past in South Africa as is characterized by the Caucasian maltreatment of Africans for his social and economic benefits. Meanwhile, let me refer you to the improper State of Mind of Property Chapter xi …” nothing but whipping, scolding, and starving. Why, sir, I’ve been so hungry that I have been glad to take the bones they threw to their dogs; and when I was awake whole nights and cried, it was a little fellow, and laid awake whole nights and cried, it wasn’t hunger, it wasn’t the whipping, I cried for. No sir; it was for my mother and my sisters – it was because I hadn’t a friend to love me on earth. I never knew what peace or comfort was. I never had a kind word spoken to me till I came to your factory.” (p.118)
The state did not care. Those American in the south ensured that laws putting Negroes in their place so to say were rigorously executed as Mrs. Stowe has portrayed here:
“…I shall give her up and live with another woman. And all your laws give him power to do, in spite of God or man. Mr. Wilson, look at it. There isn’t one of these things, that have broken the hearts of my mother and my sister, and my wife and me, but your laws allow, and give every man power to do, in Kentucky, and none can say to him nay! Do you call these the laws of my country? Sir, I haven’t any country, any more than I have any father. But I’m going to have one. I don’t want anything of your country, except to be let alone – to go peaceably out of it; and when I get to Canada, where the laws will own me and protect me, that shall be my country and its laws I will obey. But if any man tries to stop, e, Let him take care, for I am desperate. I’ll fight for my liberty to the last breath I breathe. You say your father did it; if it was right for them, it is right for me.’” (p.l 118)
When reading between the lines you will notice that some slavers actually substantiating their acts of enslaving Africans:“’It’s undoubtedly the intention of Providence that the African race should be servants – kept in a low condition,” ‘said a grave-looking gentleman in black, a clergyman, seated by the cabin-door. “‘Cursed by Canaan; a servant of servants shall be,” the Scripture says,”’
“I say, stranger, is that ar what that text means?” said a tall man, standing by.“Undoubtedly. It pleased Providence, for some inscrutable reason, to doom the race to bondage ages ago; and we must not set up our opinion against that.” (p. 128).
Further, in the novel, the authoress highlighted this point in the following terms: At this juncture St. Clare is chatting with Marie on the sermon of Dr. G----. Well, I mean all my views about society and such things,” said Marie. “The test was, ‘He hath made everything beautiful in its season;’ and he showed how all the orders and distinctions in society came from God; and that it was so appropriate, you know, and beautiful, that some should be high and some low, and that some were born to rule and some to serve, and all that, you know, and he applied it to so well to all this ridiculous fuss that is made about slavery, and he proved distinctly that the Bible was on our side, and supported all our institutions so convincingly. I only wish you’d heard him.” (p.186). The Bible is on their side George one the slaves confirmed: “ Is God on their side?” said George, speaking less to his wife than pouring out his own bitter thoughts. “Does he see all that they do? Why does he let such things happen? And they tell us that the Bible is on their side; certainly, all the power is. They are rich and healthy, and happy; they are members of church, expecting to go to heaven; and they get along so easy in the world, and have it all their own way; and poor, honest, faithful Christians – Christians as good or better than they – are lying in the very dust under their feet. They buy ‘em and sell ‘em, and make a trade of their hearts’ blood, and groans and tears – and God lets them.”(p.194)
The Bible is cited in several cases to justify the torture of African Americans, who were then called niggers or blacks. Black, in this case, was a debased term to stand for a subhuman creature that was intellectually hollow. He came from the Dark Continent that gained its name from the fact that it was not well-known and not necessarily because of it hard dark-skinned citizens.
“Well, here’s a pious dog, at last let down among us sinners! – a saint, a gentleman, and no less, to talk to us sinners about our sins. Powerful holy critter he must be! Here, you rascal you make believe to be so pious – didn’t you hear, out of yer Bible, ‘Servants, obey your masters?’ An’t I your master? Didn’t I pay down twelve hundred dollars, cash, for all there is inside yer old cussed black shell? An’t yer mine, now m body and soul?” he said, giving Tom a violent kick with his heavy boot! ‘Tell me!’” (p. 356)
Some African American slaves had known of fetishes before they were sold into slavery. Some wore fetishes or gregories the believed made them not to feel pains when they were being flogged. (p.368). Of course, the slaves had to do anything conceivable if they were to avoid being killed or flogged. Another sort of punishment was tying someone on a tree and had a slow fire lit around him. (p. 377).
As we peruse the work further, we see a citation of the Scriptures to substantiate slaver and slave trade and other economic rationales: It is argued that what is being done to the slaves as a survival trait is what the aristocracy and capitalists were doing to the lower classes, commoners:
“He says that there can be no high civilization without enslavement of the masses, eight nominal or real. There must, he says, be a lower class given up to physical toil and confined to an animal nature; and a higher one thereby acquires leisure and wealth for more expanded intelligence and improvement, and becomes the directing souls of the lower.” (232). Miss Ophelia who advances this argument went on that “The English laborer is not sold, traded, parted from his family, whipped.”…..”He is as much at the will of his employer as if he were sold to him. The slave-owner can whip his refractory slave to death – the capitalist can starve him to death. As to family security, it is hard to say which the worst is, – to have one’s children sold, or see them starve to death at home.”
Still on maltreatment of slaves:
“I didn’t give it for one – nay, I’ll say, besides, that ours is the more bold and palpable infringement of human rights. Actually buying a man up, like a horse - looking at his teeth, cracking his joints, and trying his paces, and then paying down to him – having speculators, breeder, traders, and brokers in human bodies and souls –sets the thing before the eyes of the civilized world in a more tangible form, thought the thing done he, after all, in its nature, the same: that is, appropriating one set of human beings to the use and improvement of another, without any regard to their own.” (p. 233)
Still, on the power on their side, you can deduce more from this conversation. Apart from tearing families apart without remorse here is an incident concerning a runaway slaver called George who is cornered and had to confront his pursuers or lost his life:
“At this moment George appeared on the top of a rock above then, and speaking in a calm, clear voice, said—“Gentlemen, who are you, down there, and what do you want?”“We want a party of runaway niggers,” said Tom Loker. “One George Harris, and Eliza Harris, and their son, and Jim Selden, and an old woman. We’ve got the officers here, and a warrant to take ‘em, and we’re going to have ‘em too. D’ye hear? An’t you George Harris, that belongs to Mr. Harris, of Shelby country, Kentucky”?“I am George Harris, A Mr. Harris, of Kentucky, did call me his property. But now I ‘ma a free man, standing on God’s free soil; and my wife and my child I claim as mine. Jim and his mother are here. We have arms to defend ourselves, and we mean to do it. You can come up if you like, but the first one of you that comes within the range of our bullets is a death man, and the next, and the next; and so on until the last.” (p.200)
George is aware of how vulnerable he is in that society. The laws are for the Caucasians and not for the Negroid races. Again he reminds the reader of the predication of slaves:
“I know very well that you’ve got the law on your side and the power,” said George, bitterly. “You mean to take my wife to sell in New Orleans, and put my boy like a calf in a trader’s pen, and send Jim’s older mother to the brute that whipped and abused her before because he couldn’t abuse her son. You wan to send Jim and me back to be whipped and tortured, and ground down under the heels of them that you call masters; and your laws will bear you out in it – more shame for you and them! But you haven’t got us. We don’t own your laws; we don’t own your country, we stand here as free, under God’s sky, as you are; and by the great God that made us, we’ll fight for our liberty till we die.” (pp. 200-201).
It was not only that. There were others who were of the point that slavery was indispensable. I remember reading Ndeh Ntumazah’s (2001) autobiography, A Conversational Autobiography in which he portrayed the relationship the Cameroon Republic had with France as akin to that of a famished lion and a goat. To him, the lion, that is France the lion cannot live without eating the goat which in this case is the Cameroon Republic. The goat has no one to come to challenge the lion and the goat is bound to be at the whim of the lion. He lives because the lion wants him to live and he could be eaten at any time without remorse. In a similar vein, slavery was a necessary phrase in the rose world and there was no way that it could have been avoided. It buttressed and greased the Western economy:
“The whole frame-work of society, both in Europe and America, is made up of various things which will not stand the scrutiny of any very ideal standard of morality. It’s pretty generally understood that men don’t aspire after the absolute right, but only to do about as well as the rest of the world. Now, when anyone speaks up, like a man, and says slavery is necessary to us, we can’t get along without it, we should be beggared if we give it up, and, of course, we mean to hold on to it – this is strong, clear, well-defined language; it has the respectability of truth to it; and if we may judge by their practice, the majority of the world will bear us out in it. But then he begins to put a long face, and snuffle, and quote Scripture, I incline to think he isn’t much better than he should be.” (p. 188)
At one stage, Mrs. Stowe's message was blatantly clear without mincing her words:
Who does not know how our great men are outdoing themselves in declaiming against the foreign slave-trade? There are a perfect host of Clarkson and Wilberforce risen up among us on that subject, most edifying to hear and behold. Trading Negroes from Africa, dear read, is so horrid! It is not to be thought of! But trading them from Kentucky – that’s quite another thin! (p.137)
Although the negro was being denied basic acceptable existence: “The Negro, it must be remembered, is an exotic of the most gorgeous and superb countries of the world, and he has deep in his heart a passion for all that is splendid, rich and fanciful; a passion which, rudely indulged by an untrained taste, draws on them the ridicule of the colder and more correct white race”. (p.167)
The whites were debating if the Negro was equal to them. One character remarked that the Lord made the Negro one blood with the roses (Whites) and Marie screamed that Negroes “They are a degraded race.” Marie screamed that there was no way to put beaming blacks on the same footing with the roses. In spite of working for the roses as slaves, the roses turned round to call Negroes wicked creatures. (p.179)
Prognostication of the authoress
In spite of the appalling picture the authoress painted of the African American conditions in those days, she also saw a light at the end of the tunnel particularly when it would be the turn of the Africans to rule the world. Many people had said that when Africans will eventually take over their rightful place on earth and have the reign of the rule, the world might mimic heaven. In another case, it was advanced that the negro was naturally more impressible to religious sentiment than the white.” (p.233). The question we will like to ask is if this was the case why are there no Bishops of Rome since the 14th century? This could be due to subtle racism. If not why is this not so when Africans had been bishops or Rome and had worked efficiently.
See page 183:
“If ever, Africa shall show an elevated and cultivated race – and come it must, sometimes, her turn to figure in the great drama of human improvement –life will awake there with a gorgeous splendor of which cold western tribes faintly have conceived. In that far-off mystic land of gold, and gems, and spices, and waving palms, and wondrous flowers, and miraculous fertility, will awake new forms of art, new styles of splendor; and the negro race, no longer despised and trodden down, will, perhaps, show forth some of the latest and most magnificent revelations of human life. Certainly, they will, in their gentleness, their lowly docility of heart, their attitude to repose on a superior mind and rest on a higher power, their childlike simplicity of affection, and facility of forgiveness. In all these they will exhibit the highest form of the peculiarly Christian life, and perhaps, as God chasteneth whom he loveth, he hath chosen poor Africa in the furnace of affliction, to make her the highest and noblest in that kingdom which he will set up when every other kingdom had been tried and failed; for the first shall be last, and the last first.” (p.183)
The remorse of some Americans is subsumed in the following phrases:
“I declare to you,” said he, suddenly stopping before his cousin – “it’s no sort of use to talk or to feel on this subject – but I declare to you, there have been times when I have thought, if the whole country would sink, and hide all this injustice and misery from the light, I would willingly sink with it. When I have been travelling up and down on our boats, or about on my collecting tours, and reflected that every brutal, disgusting, mean, low-lived fellow I met, was allowed by our laws to become absolute despot of as many men, women, and children, as he could cheat, steal, or gamble money enough to buy – when I have seen such men in actual ownership of helpless children, of young girls and women – I have been ready to curse my country, to curse the human race!” (p. 226).
The situation could have been exacerbated had the Northerners (Northern citizens of the USA) not got appalled by this maltreatment of Africans, slavers considered as subhuman beings by slavers:
“To this day I have no patience with the unutterable trash that some of your patronizing Northerners have made up, as in their zeal to apologize for our sins. We all know better. Tell me that any man living wants to work all his days, from day-dawn till dark, under the constant eye of a master, without the power of putting forth one irresponsible volition, on the same dreary, monotonous, unchanging toil, and all for two pairs of pantaloons and a pair of shoes a year, with enough food and shelter to keep him in working order! Any man who thinks that human beings can, as a general thing, be made about as comfortable that way as any other, I wish he might try it. I’d buy the dog and work him, with a clear conscience!” (p. 232).
Furthermore, there is a cardinal question as who was to educate the Negroes if and when they were to be liberated: The authoress is speaking here through St. Clare who is painted to be so hard on the slaves:
Also, there was a belief that if Negroes were liberated they were to revert to laziness.:
“Now I’m principled against emancipation in any case. Keep a negro under the care of a master, and he does well enough and is respectable; but set then free and they get lazy and won’t work, and take to drinking, and go all down to be mean, worthless fellows. I‘ve seen it tried hundreds of times. It's not favored to set them free.” P. 324)
The authoress account is balanced. She had not only concentrated on men but portrayed the women too as here:
“…the reader may be curious to take a peep at the corresponding apartment allotted to the women. Stretched out in various attitudes over the floor, he may see numberless sleeping forms of every shade of complexion, from the purest ebony to white, and of all years, from childhood to old age, lying now asleep. Here is a fine bright girl, of ten years, whose mother was sold out yesterday, and who to-night cried herself to sleep when nobody was looking at her. Here, a worn old Negress, whose thin arms and callous fingers tell of hard toil, waiting to be sold tomorrow, as a cast-off article, for what can be got for her; and some forty or fifty other, with heads variously enveloped in blankets or articles of clothing, lie stretched around them. But, in a corner, sitting apart from the rest, are two females of a more interesting appearance than common. One of these is a respectably-dressed mulatto woman between forty and fifty, with soft eyes and a gentled and pleasing physiognomy. She has on her head a high-raised turban, made of a gay red Madras handkerchief, of the first quality, and her dress is neatly fitted, and of good material, showing that she has been provided for with a careful hand. By her side, and nestling closely to her, is a young girl of fifteen- her daughter. She is a quadroon, as may be seen from her fairer complexion, though her likeness to her mother is quite discernible. She has the same soft dark eye, with longer lashes, and her curling hair is a luxuriant brown. She also is dressed with great neatness, and her white, delicate hands betray very little acquaintance with servile toil. These tow are to be sold tomorrow, in the same lot with the St. Clare servants; and the gentleman to who they belong, and to whom the money for their sale is to be transmitted, is a member of a Christian church in New York, who will receive the money, and go thereafter to the sacrament of his Lord and theirs, and think no more of it. (pp.328-329)
The girl was anxious as she was might have been preparing herself mentally to say adieu to her mother:
“Both (mother and daughter who had been sent to the general depot to await being auction) are weeping, but each quietly, that the other may not hear.
“Mother, just lay your head on my lap, and see if you can’t sleep a little,” says the girl, trying to appear calm.
“I haven’t any heart to sleep, Em! I can’t. It’s the last night we may be together!”
“Ohm mother, don’t say so! Perhaps we shall get sold together – who knows?”
“If‘t was anybody else’s case, I should say so too, Em,” said the woman; “but I’m so feared of losing’ you that I don’t see anything but the danger.”(p.329)
You will like to have a glimpse of the examination of the girl. I have it here for those who can stomach it:
“He paused a moment before Dolph; then spitting a discharge of tobacco-juice on his well-blacked boots, and giving a contemptuous umph, he walked on. Again he stopped before Sudan and Emmeline. He put out his heavy, dirty hand, and drew the girl towards hi; passed it over her neck and bust, felt her arms, looked at her teeth, and then pushed her back against her mother, who patient face showed the suffering she had been going through at every motion of the hideous stranger.
The girl was frightened, and began to cry.” (p.333)
You have not seen half of what to place at the slave depot auction: Read on:
“Now, up with you, boy! D’ye hear?” said the auctioneer to Tom.
Tom stepped upon the block, gave a few anxious looks around; all seemed mingled in a common, indistinct noise – the clatter of the salesman crying off his qualification in French and English, the quick fire of French and English bids; and almost in a moment came the final thump of the hammer, and the clear ring on the last syllable of the word ‘dollars,’ as the auctioneer announced his price, and Ton was made over. He had a master!
E was pushed from the block; the short, bullet-headed man, seizing him roughly by the shoulder, pushed him to one side, saying, in a harsh voice, ‘Stand there, you!’
Tom hardly realized anything; but still, the bidding went on - rattling, chattering, now French, and now English. Down goes the hammer again, - Susan is sold. She goes down from the block, stops, and looks wistfully back; her daughter stretches her hands towards her. She looks with agony in the face of the man who has bought her – a respectable middle-aged man, of benevolent countenance.
“O mas’r please does buy my daughter!”“I‘d like to, but I’m afraid I can’t afford it,” said the gentleman, looking with painful interest as the young girl mounted the block and looked at her with a frightened and timid glance.
The blood flushes painfully in her otherwise colorless cheek, her eyes have a feverish fire, and her mother groans to see that she looks more beautiful than she ever saw her before. The auctioneer sees his advantage and expatiates volubly in mingled French and English, and bids rise in rapid succession” (P. 334)
You will read that dogs were specially trained to track down runaway slaves the called niggers. Also, you will soon read that when niggers had an opportunity to own one of their kind as slaves they were even badly treated than the Caucasian roses would:
Read on:“These two colored men were the two principal hands on the plantation. Legree had trained them in savageness and brutality as systematically as he had his bull-dogs; and, by long practice in hardness and cruelty, brought their whole nature to about the same range capacities. It is a common remark and one that is thought to militate strongly against the character of the race, that the Negro overseer is always more tyrannical and cruel than the white one. This is simply saying that the Negro mind has been more crushed and debase than the white. It is no truer of this race than of every oppressed race, the world over. The slave is always a tyrant if he can get a chance to be one.Legree, like some potentates we read of in history, governed his plantation by a sort of resolution of force. Sambo and Quimbo cordially hated each other; the plantation hands, one and all, cordially hated them; and by playing off one against another he was pretty sure, through one or the other of the three parties, to get informed of whatever was on foot in the place.” (P. 344).
You will also like to know that as girls were separated from their boyfriends or husbands they were also forcefully given to others in their new home. Do we associate African-American promiscuity to have had its origin in the days of slavery and slave trade?
Read on:
“Here, you Sambo,” said Legree, “take these yer boys down to their quarters; and here’s agal I‘ve got for you,” said he, as he separated the mulatto woman from Emmeline and pushed her towards him. “I promised to bring you one, you know.”
The woman gave a sudden start, and, drawing back, said suddenly –
“O mas’r! I left my old man in New Orleans.”
“What of that, you -! won’t you want one here? None o’ your words – go’ long!” said Legree, raising his whip.
“Come, mistress, “he said to Emmeline, “you go in here with me.” (p.345).
How did they work? They toiled from dawn to dusk with little food under the driving lash of the overseers. When they return to their shacks they grounded the morsel of hard corn on their hand-mills into a meal. If they were not cooperating for any reason, they were flogged with cow hides. There was not sympathy. It is for this reason that those who managed to escape to Canada felt that they had reached a heaven on earth they prayed for when the recited the Our Father as we can glean from this stanza:
“’T was something like burst from death to life;
From the grave’s cerements to the robes of heaven;
From sin’s dominion, and from passions’ strife,
To the pure freedom of a soul forgiven;
Where all the bonds of death and hell are riven,
And mortal puts on immortality,
When Mercy’s hand hath turned the golden key,
And Mercy’s voice hath said, ‘Rejoice, thy soul is free!’”
The authoress still sees a glimmer of hope and is convinced that in heaven, Africans will receive their rewards a hundredfold.
“And, with streaming eyes and choking voice, the black man looked up to heaven.
And this O Africa! – latest called of nations, called to the crown of thorns, the scourge, the bloody sweat, the cross of agony – this is to be thy victory; by this shalt thou reign with Chris when his kingdom shall come on earth….Tom’s tears “fell like dew on the wild, unsettled spirit of the poor woman” As Mrs. Stowe concluded optimistically: “The longest way must have its close – the gloomiest night will wear on to a morning. An eternal, inexorable lapse of moments is ever hurrying the day of the evil to an eternal night, and the night of the just to an eternal day. The Caucasoid, roses were wrong as a stream cannot rise above its fountain. As long ago as that, Stowe saw before anyone else the freedom of Africans coming and the ruling themselves.
“Where, then, shall look? On the shores of Africa, I see a republic – a republic formed of picked men, who, by energy and self-education force, have, in many cases, individually, raised themselves above a condition of slavery. Having gone through a preparatory state of feebleness, this republic has, at last, become an acknowledged nation on the face of the earth – acknowledged by both France and England. The question was how America will wipe from her escutcheon that bar sinister which disgraces her among nations, and it is truly a curse to her as to the enslaved.”
(p.428).
She would not hide her admiration for Africans as affectionate, magnanimous, and forgiving one. There is a reward for Africans as promised by Stowe, what she calls the splendid words of prophecy:
‘Whereas thou hast been forsaken and hated, so that no man went through thee; I will make thee an eternal excellence, a joy of many generations!” When will this happen to Africa? Is it happening now? Is what President Barack Obama moves to look after the downtrodden the opening of the once closed doors of Africa, Asians who would have been homeless in their countries the beginning? He would not be popular for his good deeds. Then it should be known that often times our fame comes when we are long gone and the prophets who were disdained in their hometowns are then glorified and their gravestones replaced by gold. The world is changing for good irrespective of ugly heads rising because of religious differences, fundamentalism particularly in the Middle East, Africa, and S. E. Asia. These are all cyclical paradigms in our lives, perhaps coming us to change for good. They will go away too as slavery on a vast scale did. Slavery, colonialism, homophobia and many more evils that were accepted as norms in the past considered in all parts of the world are now considered as decadence, injustice. There is light at the end of the tunnel provided we have to guard against what provoked writers like Stowe to remind us to always look at the other persons we maltreat as if they were us. You do not want your children or yourself to be unjustly treated. We are reasoning today as civilized people and Satan is not dominating us as in days of Stowe. Does this not tell us that God listens to us?
The End is not the end but the beginning!
Ottawa,
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
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