I read Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin when I was in the Seventh Grade because my Seventh Grade Social Studies teacher told our class the book missed the true meaning of the Civil War. My teacher was also my Junior High football coach and I liked and respected him. He was a solidly built white man about thirty-five years old. He ran his Social Studies class using the same system he used to coach.
He gave clear instructions and we players and students followed them. We won football games and accepted his interpretation of America’s cultural history the same way we players absorbed extra wind-sprints for mistakes on the practice field in 90º heat in September.
Both our football team and our Social Studies class were comprised of white kids as Oklahoma had not as yet integrated its schools. I do not know if there was a Social Studies class for Junior High, what we then called Colored kids, in my small hometown. Thus, I have no knowledge if they would have been taught Uncle Tom’s Cabin was enlightened or misguided or if it was simply ignored.
I remember the firmness in my teacher/coach’s voice as he described Mrs. Stowe’s novel as a book of fiction written by a northern Yankee whose uninformed views on slavery were influenced by her family’s brand of the Christian religion. As our Christian instructor told us, “The Civil War was not about slavery but State’s Rights”. That was not what I had been told by my Osage Indian Sunday School teacher or my parents. It was confusing.
However, football was more important than whether some long-dead writer was an accurate observer or a fervent abolitionist. So, I took in the lecture and let it roll off as most of the other stuff. That is, until the day my friends, Abby and Jack, brought the issues of State’s Rights and human rights into perspective.
Abby sat near me in class and Jack sat right next to her. Jack liked Abby but was unskilled in the ways to a girl’s heart. He sought her attention but thought to get it through pre-teen means. When our teacher left the classroom to get a book, Jack saw his chance to garner Abby’s ardor by slipping a thumbtack on her chair. She sat down on it just as the disciplinarian returned. She yelled and our teacher immediately went into coach mode.
At that time I had not learned about the tender mercies of Simon Legree but I got a preview from the Coach. He had always been ready with one of the paddles he kept hanging from the chalkboard. But this time the lesson of the power structure between teacher and student was graphic. Coach chose a thin paddle and pressed two thumbtacks through it. Then he proceeded to apply maximum behavioral modification to Jack.
That next Saturday I checked out Uncle Tom’s Cabin from the public library and read about slavery from the northern viewpoint. The aphorism “Power Corrupts” became an on-the-ground example to me. Those thoughts have reoccurred now I am an adult and have observed the corruption of the Israeli Zionists immense power over their neighbors, especially the Palestinians.
As I re-read Uncle Tom’s Cabin these past two weeks, my thoughts have been, where is a Harriet Beecher Stowe’s outrage at what is the incomprehensible cruelty of babies being starved and mothers being bombed. Harriet, we need you to visit Mr. Trump as you did Mr. Lincoln. Or, perhaps, we all need to read your book again.
