TRANSCRIPT
One of the most amazing people I have ever heard about in my life is a guy named Blind Tom. I watched a documentary on television about him some years back. He was born a slave in 1849, born fully blind, or at least almost entirely blind, and showed very early in his life an affinity for music. Turned out he was a music prodigy. They also said in the documentary, I believe they used the word autistic. They called him autistic, even an autistic savant. Like, he was, according to the documentary, very emotionally shut down, didn’t really connect with people, barely spoke at all, but had an incredible facility for music. He could repeat anything that he heard, play it back, never forgot anything, had a literally brilliant memory.
And even though he personally didn’t talk much, didn’t communicate much, according to this documentary, he could repeat whole chunks of conversation that he had heard, using the tone, the inflection, and the accent and the vocabulary of the people he had heard. We’re talking like 10, 20-minute conversations, even if politicians that he had heard speak. There was something brilliant about this guy, a clear genius.
So wait, what was his psychology? So yesterday, I finally got a copy of his biography, and really interesting reading about it. I haven’t finished it entirely, but I’ve read the story of so much of his childhood, his early childhood especially. And for me, that’s where the clues are about why he was the way that he was, this incredible genius.
And they talk about other areas in which he was a genius too, being able to imitate bird sounds when he was like one or two years old, just perfectly imitate them with his voice. Imitate singing of people who sang in totally different styles that he did, different accents, different languages, even just an incredible imitative ability. By the way, the documentary also said this—I can’t verify it myself—but that he was the number one highest earning performer of the 19th century. So of the 1800s, he was the number one box office draw, as it was.
And well, for the first however many 16 years of his life, all the money that he brought in went right to his slave masters. And then after that, when he was technically legally a free man, as emancipation happened in America in 1865, well then all the money went to his former slave masters because they continued to manage him. He never got anything; his family never got anything. They kept everything. I think he died, what, 1908? I think in the north. He was living in the north, but still, you know, for a long time into his life, I don’t know, in his 30s, 40s even, he was performing and bringing in a lot of money, huge audiences. Lots of famous people even went and saw him. Mark Twain saw him and wrote about him. Willa Cather saw him and wrote about him. He was really a phenomenon, the things that he could do.
One thing, one thing that he did, this just blew my mind. Sitting at the piano, on his left hand he’s playing “Yankee Doodle.” On his right hand, he’s playing a song that I don’t know, or at least don’t know that I know, “Fisher’s Hornpipe.” Same time, he’s playing two different songs on the piano. I mean, like, who can do that? Then when it gets crazy is while he’s playing two completely different songs that don’t connect to each other on the piano, he is simultaneously singing “Dixie.” “All I wish I was in the Land of Cotton.” So playing three different melodies at once. And then they said he could turn around, put his hands behind his back, switch the songs on his hands, and still do it. Still play the melodies while backward and singing “Dixie.” It’s like, blows the mind, the capacity of this human being, like otherworldly.
So my question, my question is, I jumped into his biography, is what made him this way? And a lot of the clues are there. Well, one is he came from a family of torture, of horror. His mother had already been sold by the time he was born. His mother was older when she had him, I think like 48 years old, something like that. Already had between 12 and 21 children. She had already been sold in her life, sold away from everybody she loved, just totally separated from her family, kids, previous husband. Happened once from her childhood family. She’d already been sold, I think, three times. Most of her kids by that point had already been sold away from her. She’d been sold away from one husband. She was a breeder. She was someone who was, like, from the perspective of the slave owners, a profitable farm animal because she could continue to produce children who they could sell for a lot of money.
So this, this was Blind Tom’s mother—clearly a tortured and highly traumatized woman. Then the problem was Blind Tom was born blind. He was considered a runt. He was considered useless. He was considered nothing, garbage. And that put the death sentence on his head because he was just considered a burden. So his mother protected him. This is just fact in the biography. His mother tried to protect him as best she could, did all sorts of things to try to keep him alive, keep him shielded from the masters so they wouldn’t know, well especially as he was like one years old, how troubled he was because his behavior was very troubling.
Well, he was constantly at risk of being killed. They just would take him away and potentially kill him. Then it turned out her master, she was married to a new guy now, who she was placed with, some new guy, and told, “Now you’re married, you can breed.” They were going to be sold by this master along with the baby. So they did end up getting sold to the man who became Blind Tom’s owner for many years of his life.
And I think, what does that do to a child’s psychology to, if only unconsciously know, or even better said, to feel that your life is constantly physically in danger? And also, what did he pick up from his mom being so traumatized, being inside the womb of such a traumatized woman? So I can only imagine he grew up in a situation of horror. Now that alone obviously does not explain why he became such an incredible genius because lots of people grow up in horror and don’t become a genius like that.
Then there’s also the question of his blindness. Born almost fully or fully blind, certainly after a certain point he was fully blind. Does that explain it? Well, I’ve known quite a few blind people. I’ve known some blind people who are actually extremely musically gifted and had perfect pitch and things like that. But he clearly took it to the next level, and maybe his blindness contributed in some way. Actually, I would say certainly it did because whole visual areas of his life were just cut off. And so, like many fully blind people, his brain very early on rewired in some way toward the audio side of things.
Well, so that explains part of it to me also. But then there was more. When he was very young, one years old, once he started to get up and be able to move around and crawl around, uh, two, he was leaving his little slave shack and exploring. He started hearing things like the piano at his master’s house, and he started crawling there and being out and running out into the woods and hiding in the woods, doing things that were going to get him in a lot of trouble and could seriously risk his life.
So the biography said he got whippings from his mom, presumably from his dad too, I don’t know, but beatings. He was beaten. And the biographer presented it if they were doing this to protect him, to save his life. Well, I’m not going to get into that, and maybe it may well be true. Maybe they had no other options at their disposal or this was all they knew. But from the perspective of a little boy, a curious little boy, he was being tortured by following his passion, by following his curiosity, wandering around, trying to explore his world, not understanding what the rules of this world were, to be severely beaten, to be whipped. Well, that’s a trauma for a child. Something in that certainly must have affected him. But then there was one thing that was even more disturbing, and I don’t remember this having been in…
The documentary, but I read it very clearly in his biography, is they were scared his wanderings were going to get him in trouble. They, being his mother and his father, they didn’t want the white Masters on the plantation to know how odd he was, that he was considered crazy even. So they started keeping him in a wooden box. They kept him in there a lot, like for starters, all day long when they were out of their little Shack, maybe at night too, because at night he would sneak out. He didn’t sleep, things like this. So who knows how long he was kept in this place? Solitary confinement, psychological torture.
And the biographer kind of suggested it, then I feel it’s probably true. The more he was isolated, the more he compensated for his deprivations in other ways. And this may help to explain some of his psychology. Now, another side of it was he was given an opportunity. And the opportunity was the family that owned him. The family that bought him had several young children who were musical. They sang, they played piano, they played other instruments, and he could hear this.
Eventually, they figured out that he had a gift on the piano. He could just do things that were very innate and natural. He did get some training along the way, but he just had—he took to this instrument. And they let him play. At a certain point, first they banned him, then they let him play, then they gave him full access. They realized they had a little genius on their hand, they had a little Prodigy on their hand. And I think they thought we can make money off of this.
But they gave him access to the piano, and that became his life. Suddenly, it became a channel for everything he’d previously been denied. And I think all those years of terrible, terrible deprivation between zero and what, four? I think he was around four years old when he was given full access to this excellently tuned piano. I think the deprivation, boom, it went right into this piano. And they said he could play, and he did for much of his life, all of his life, perhaps even 12 hours a day of playing, just playing and playing and playing and playing.
Now, does this all explain his psychology? Does this early horrible deprivation, trauma, violation explain his behavior? I don’t think so. Even the biographer, I’m not really sure. She, the biographer, she said that the slaves around him, the local African-American folk who saw him, they just felt he was touched—touched by God, touched by some Magical Mystery, a miracle even. And she talked about it coming out of African tradition, about some children just being born touched, being gifted in some special way. And that was their full explanation of it.
Well, as I listen to that, strangely, I think it’s actually kind of true. And this is really what I wanted to talk about today. Not that I fully believe that he was just touched, because I think everybody is, nah, to some degree or other. I think just some people, a lot more than one in a billion, some people just are born with special gifts. Some people are just born different. Is it genetic? Is it what? I don’t know. But I think there was something about him that was just born bigger, better, more special inside—more energy, more passion, more of a desire to express himself.
I’ve seen children like this. I think I am one, actually, to some degree. I’ve always just been a little different. Some special passion that was very forceful. Now, I didn’t get restricted in the way that Blind Tom did. I did in some ways, I did get my traumas. But I think if this is—this would be my assessment—in his case, it was this huge, big, passionate personality being forced through a tiny little hole, being deprived of all these other options. And he didn’t lose his passion. Some do. Some do.
I’ve seen children who were severely deprived and neglected, blind even, who grew up to become intellectually disabled, formerly known as mentally—it just—or so withdrawn that there’s nothing coming out, or very, very little is being expressed in terms of things that we consider, quote, positive in our modern world. Blind Tom, Tom Wiggins, I think this was it. It’s just something—some force of nature was imbued in him. He was some positive evolutionary mutant in some way. He was just extremely unusual, some combination of incredibly gifted and incredibly misfortuned in another way.
And that combination together, all that passion put through this tiny little pinhole produced an absolutely unusual, impossible-to-believe, ultra-gifted being. That’s my take on it. And you know, they said things about him—oh, he was autistic and infantile autism and words and diagnoses and medical things. I don’t know how I feel about that.
Oh, they also said—the biographer said, she said it a few times so far, I’ve read this—Tom Wiggins had no empathy, no empathy for others. An example she gave, he attacked his siblings, physically attacked them, biting them and trying to hurt them and tormenting them, and somehow burned one of his younger sisters. And she was left with like a scar on her head from this and laughing when he did this. He didn’t display appropriate responses, didn’t have empathy for them, was laughing as they would scream.
I heard other stories of this in the book that he attacked someone else and was, you know, when he was like older, an adult, having some guy on the ground and was holding him by the throat—some guy who somehow got into his private chambers, his dressing room or something like that—and he was holding him on the ground and like I was howling in pain, and Tom, ha ha, I thought this was so funny.
Well, is this lack of empathy? I interpret it differently. I wonder, actually, is this—maybe this was what was going on? Because they make him out like, oh, he was a little sociopath, you know, like other kids. Oh, they torture animals, they have no empathy at all, they hurt other kids, they’re bullies, they have no empathy. No, I don’t see it that way.
I actually would interpret his behavior and the behavior of other children who do things like this as they’re actually trying to get empathy for themselves. They are creating a situation, fomenting a situation in which this other being, who they’re hurting or torturing, is feeling what they felt once upon a time and the feelings they’re still buried inside them. And when this person expresses the pain and the torment, actually the person who’s the tormentor is feeling a connection with his or her own buried trauma and horror and is empathizing with himself using this other person as a proxy.
And it’s an attempt to heal—crazy to say it, but this is how I observe it. It’s an attempt to empathize with oneself, one’s own history, one’s own traumas, and maybe even to have this other person witness him, say, “Look, this is what I went through. I’m going to physically express to you what I went through so you can know me, you can connect with me, you can empathize with me. I can empathize with myself, you can empathize with me.” And maybe even I’m laughing because I’m so impassioned that I can empathize with you for what you’re going through, aside from the fact that I’m causing it.
This is just what I wonder. So, oh, they put it, he has no empathy, he’s this—no, I just don’t know if I agree with that. So this is—I think about his childhood, and I think the bigger picture. I think the real reason that I came to talk about this is just that I do believe some children really are born different in a positive way, gifted in a positive way. And no matter how much life crushes them and denies them and deprives them and hurts them and tortures them and reduces their possibilities, they are still going to find a way, one way or another, to express their beauty.