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"Uncle Tom And Tiny Tim: Some Reflections On The Cripple As Negro"

Creator: Leonard Kriegel (author)
Date: 1969
Publication: The American Scholar
Publisher: United Chapters of Phi Beta Kappa
Source: Available at selected libraries

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About six months after I arrived in the New York State Reconstruction Home in West Haverstraw in 1944, a fellow patient, who had been in the home for more than a year, casually remarked. "They got you by the hump. No matter which way you turn, they got you." At that time, I was not yet twelve, and I took so bland an overture with all the suspicion and self-righteousness of a Boy Scout who finds himself thrust into the center of a gang war. I, for, one, knew that I had been born to be saved and I was concerned only with caking the shell of my determination to succeed. I simply was not going to be a cripple. (I wouldn't even permit myself to use the word then, not even to think it.) I was determined to do everything I had been told I must do by doctors, nurses, physical therapists, by anybody who seemed to me an authority on "my condition." However mysteriously, I was convinced that the task of restoring nerves to my dead legs lay in obediently listening to my superiors, and I accepted anyone's claim to superiority on the very simple and practical basis that he could walk. If I listened, if I obeyed without questioning, I would someday once again lead "a normal life." The phrase meant living in the way my superiors lived. I could virtually taste those words, and for years afterward I could be sent off into a redemptive beatitude if anybody told me that I was on my way toward leading "a normal life". For the cripple, the first girl kissed, the first money earned, the first restaurant entered alone -- all are visible manifestations of redemption, symbolic of "a normal life."

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In my ignorance, I did not understand that my fellow patient unfolded what would ultimately seem a truism. He understood something that I could not have admitted to myself, even if I had been brave enough to recognize it. My life was not my own, and it would take immense effort for me ever to control it -- even to the extent that anyone not crippled can control his life. Whoever they were, they had got me, too. And no matter which way turned, they would decide, in their collective wisdom, how my fate was to be carved out. Nor was it me as an individual cripple alone whom they had got. I was soon to discover that, in varying degrees, they had my family also. Disease is a sharing, a gray fringe of existence where man, however protesting, remains if not at his most communal, then at his most familial. For the cripple, the message of disability is invariably personal, and he carries with the physical reminder -- the eyes that do not see, the limp, the rigid fear of undergoing an epileptic seizure in some strange corner of the universe, the bitter dregs of a mind that he realizes works neither wisely nor too well -- the knowledge is, in some remarkably fundamental way, the creator of those who have created him. Perhaps it is not what Wordsworth in mind, but the cripple knows that the child is father to the man -- and to the woman, too --, especially when that child's existence is conditioned by the peculiar nature of his handicap. There is no choice. "No matter which way you turn, they got you." The cripple, at least, has the immediacy of his own struggle to overcome. His parents have little more than their obligation to his birth.

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The cripple, then, is a social fugitive, a prisoner of expectations molded by a society that he makes uncomfortable by his very presence. For this reason, the most functional analogy for the life leads is to be found in the Negro. For the black man, now engaged in wresting an identity from a white society apparently intent on mangling its own, has become in America a synonym for that which insists on the capacity of its own being. At the risk demanding from Black America more than it can yet give itself, let me suggest that here we have both analogy and method. No one can teach the cripple, can serve as so authoritative a model in the quest for identity, as can the black man. I say this in spite of knowledge that Black America may simply be fed up with serving the society in any manner whatsoever. "To us," writes Fanon, "the man who adores the Negro is as 'sick' as the man who abominates him." It is not the black who must offer explanations. Far more than the cripple, he has been the victim of television interviewers, of scientific sociologists of the soul, of those seemingly innumerable bearers of "truth," those contemporary witch doctors intent on analyzing us all to death. For the cripple, the black man is a model because he is on intimate terms with a terror does not recognize his existence and is yet distinctly personal. He is in the process of discovering what he is, and he has known for a long time what the society conceives him to be. His very survival guarantees him the role of rebel. What he has been forced to learn is how to live on the outside looking in. Until quite recently, he was not even asked how he liked it. But this has been the essential fact of the black's existence and it is with this very same fact that the cripple must begin, for he, too, will not be asked how he likes it. He too, must choose a self that is not the self others insist he accept. Just as Uncle Tom, in order to placate the power of white America, learned to mask his true self until he felt himself in a position of total desperation or rising hope (or some combination of the two), so the cripple has the right, one is tempted to say the responsibility, to use every technique, every subterfuge, every mask, every emotional climate -- no matter how false and seemingly put on -- to alter the balance in his relation to the world around him.

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